Let's face it, technological determinism is terrible politics

By Matthew Taylor 

In the year ahead technological change will continue to impact on our lives, but we will question it much more. It's a mindset that's greatly needed

It is a basic premise of most futurology that tomorrow will be profoundly shaped by technological change. But in 2019 there will be a widespread pushback against technological determinism.

While some changes will come closer, others will move further away. Amara’s law – that we overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate its effect in the long run – will be proven right again as it turns out we are many years away from driverless roads or affordable lab-grown meat. Elsewhere, in areas such as personalised pharmacology and screening, tech-enabled change will accelerate, and healthcare providers and investors will realise what education systems learned with the underwhelming performance of Moocs – namely that the human touch brings something machines can’t replicate.

Adding to the revival of vinyl, there will be more examples of people turning the clock back: buying more books than Kindles, choosing simple phones over smart ones, increasingly turning off their devices entirely as they grow more worried about social-media manipulation and addiction. As well being as an increasingly recommended form of parenting, tech rejection will become a recognised political stance. For example, as the full impact on the environment, working lives and cityscapes of the shift from pounding the high street to home delivery becomes clear, more people will become proud online-shopping refuseniks.

This will be threatening to some companies but, as always, business will find ways of making money from new tastes. A decade ago, in the face of piracy and low-cost streaming, the tech determinists said the music business had lost its value proposition. Not many predicted we would got on to listen to much more music as mobile devices became radio stations and record libraries, and even fewer that we would – even in the UK – go from a handful of music festivals a year to dozens.

Expert predictions for technology-led job change range wildly – from half the workforce being unemployed to a large number of new jobs being created. As has happened with previous waves of change, most economists will be proven wrong. As business models evolve, the content of jobs will change, but the jobs will largely remain. Escalating trade wars may even lead to greater economic and technological divergence as protectionist governments back and protect their own brands of innovation.

Technological determinism is also, we will realise, terrible politics. Around the world we are seeing a backlash against the idea of globalisation as a benign and unstoppable force that can be trusted to the hands of major corporations and technocrats in international institutions. But often the discourse about technological change presents the same story that ordinary folk must sit back and cope with what the global elite impose on them. Expect the temperature to be turned up on the tech giants, as leaders in nations and cities around the world discover that attacking smooth-talking, tax-avoiding, regulation-dodging Californian plutocrats is a sure fire way to win popularity.

Progressives are starting to see that the response to populism needs to be humanism: an emphasis on sustainability, well-being and personal development. Citizen will increasingly consider, before buying in to the next big thing, that we should ask how technological change will help us live better lives together on a shrinking planet. And we will hear more political accounts of technological possibility – such as Aaron Bastani’s vision of “fully automated luxury communism”, in which machines do all the “work” and we rediscover leisure.

Technology enables future choices, but it doesn’t determine them. That’s the principle we will take to heart in 2019./wired

* Matthew Taylor is chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts