BOOK REVIEW: The Cybernetic Society: How Humans and Machines Will Shape the Future Together
By Amir Husain / Basic Books
Reviewed by: Terence Check
The Reviewer —Terence Check is the Associate Chief Counsel for Infrastructure Security and Regulatory Programs, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency. He is a former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, Southern District of Texas, and is Adjunct Professor, Cleveland State University College of Law. He holds an LL.M. from American University and a J.D. from Cleveland State University. All statements made in the review are in his personal capacity and do not reflect the position of any institution or agency.
REVIEW —Are you ready for a future of athletes with surgically enhanced skeletons, octogenarian millionaires kept young by nanobots in their blood, or government analysts with ocular implants that can instantaneously translate any document in any language?
How might this future benefit society, do those benefits outweigh any costs to our inherent humanity, and how might we govern such a future?
Austin-based entrepreneur and technologist Amir Husain prompts some of these questions in his new book, The Cybernetic Society, a sweeping and ambitious book that covers a lot of ground in the current tech space; perhaps too much.
Covering emerging tech from smart cities to drones to blockchain requires emphasizing breadth over depth. As a result, The Cybernetic Society could be useful for readers looking for an easy entry-point to learning about these technologies, but those with more expertise may become frustrated by the book’s “grab-bag” approach. If readers are looking for a substantive look at what I would consider the “popular” conception of cybernetics, which is more about “cyborgs” or the integration of biological and information processing systems (such as “brain computer interfaces”), be warned: this book gives only passing consideration to such topics.
Early on, Husain writes about interrelated concepts of “code, consciousness, and control” and while useful for readers to think about, the book could have been improved by regularly returning to these themes. Husain’s book did not present its definition of “cybernetics” until several chapters in, leaving the reader to wonder what kinds of technology might really be considered “cybernetic”. By a broad conception of cybernetic, one could characterize mundane uses of facial recognition or large-language models as “cybernetic”, which would seem to be less useful to examine the novel policy and social implications of the disruptive tech of the mid and far-future.
In my view, the unstated thesis of the book comes at the very end of Chapter 1, which reads: “As we integrate more deeply with machines and algorithms, the concept of error correction is not just something that can make our home broadband more reliable, it can also make our institutions and governments finally do what they should have been doing all along: perform well in our interest.”
In a chapter called “World of Neoms”, Husain writes a sentence heavy with meaning, though probably unintentionally. It reads: “near field communications and Bluetooth tags you carry or come into contact with ensure you’re supposed to be even when you’re in a subterranean hyperloop tunnel unconnected to GPS.” To me, the key word in that sentence is “supposed.” After all, who, exactly, will be doing the “supposing?” Will it be only the user themselves, some corporate manager (they’re “supposed” to be at work!), or some secret police (they’re not “supposed” to be outside their designated zone!), or other possibilities we cannot yet imagine?
For an author so immersed in the world of tech, I would have hoped for more detailed explanations of how Neom and other “connected cities” might work in practice. The chapters that focused on these elements of our cybernetic future were light on such explanations. On a smaller scale, Chapter 3’s focus on examining corporations as cybernetic organisms also seemed to lack a clear normative conclusion and would have gained a great deal of value if Husain had tied the corporate application of big data and AI-enabled corporate decision-making to his three themes of “code”, “consciousness”, and “control.”
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Having survived the opacity of federal hiring processes, I wonder whether the humans “on the loop” of corporate AI models would even be conscious of the hundreds or thousands of decisions made on their behalf. Husain’s book offers glimpses (not a full view) of a really strange cybernetic future. What would a company look like if it was staffed by a combination of AI bots and human workers bearing brain-computer interfaces, and what would such a city look like? Might your neural implant give you a jolt if you lingered too long on a coffee break, especially if tipped off by an RFID ping from the smart city sensor embedded in the coffee shop? Husain does not look at code, consciousness, or control in this context either.
To his credit, Husain offers remarkably clear takes on data privacy. Instead of the usual equivocating from both privacy hawks and corporate data collectors, Husain posits in Chapter 8 that “all of us are permanently opted in to the networked reality. . . It will never go back to being like it used to.” The only choice, Husain argues, is to “prepare oneself to live competently in a world full of networked technology” even though “the majority of us will not follow through” on these preparations and will be unable to protect themselves. In this world that Husain paints, I observe that even the act of avoidance and data hygiene will be insufficient to ensure privacy—much like my studying of burned-off fingerprints years ago, the act of avoiding detection itself leaves may leave traces that can be detected. Despite these stark conclusions, or perhaps because of them, Husain refers to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a “tempest in a teapot” for its requirements that have been “trivialized for most companies” as a box-checking exercise.
Husain’s writing is at its clearest in Chapter 8 (focusing on privacy) and Chapter 6 (focusing on the future of armed conflict) perhaps because it is in these circumstances where the stakes are most clearly defined. On the latter topic, the prospect of exoskeletons and wearable tech in defense applications stands out as potentially highly disruptive innovations for leading militaries around the world. Husain’s discussion of these developments stands out as particularly eye opening.
Husain wisely points out that the profusion of such tech, making the battlefield less-human, may “erode the moral and ethical constraints that have traditionally guided the use of force.” In consideration of these weighty questions—like what the world looks like with literal super-soldiers from cybernetic enhancements—are where The Cybernetic Society is at its strongest.
While experienced technologists might want more depth out of The Cybernetic Society, the book may pique the interest of strategists covering other national security disciplines. How might the U.S. industrial base meet the increased energy costs of all this technical development, and how might the U.S. government address the supply chain security risks of “Industry 4.0”, which promises distributed networks of small but widely integrated manufacturing operations? How might the field of counterterrorism and violence prevention evolve to accommodate a future of potentially large numbers of people left jobless in the cybernetic economy of the future? In this regard, digital literacy programs, particularly in the developing world, could have a major counter-terrorist benefit, by addressing the “significant portion of the global population [who] remains offline and without digital skills.” Chapter 9 of The Cybernetic Society offers up more of these sociological considerations, which diplomats, intelligence analysts, and policymakers might find interesting.
Overall, The Cybernetic Society feels kind of “loose”, like a sort of long-form written podcast. Some chapters, such as Chapter 7 on cliodynamics, have a rabbity, jumbled structure, where foundational information comes after paragraphs-long tangents (such as what cliodynamics even is or who created it — Russian-American scientist Peter Turchin).
Husain’s enthusiasm for a wide range of projects and companies flirts with an advertorial tone, and some seem particularly pie-in-the-sky, such as community-owned micro-networks that Husain believes would guard against mass surveillance. But what hardware would underlie such networks? Regardless of ownership, networks large and small are likely to remain dependent on a small number of tech giants for hardware, regardless of their ownership.
The Cybernetic Society ultimately had a lot of potential and perhaps could be very interesting in a revised edition. While Husain clearly possesses deep familiarity with emerging technologies and raises genuinely important questions about our networked flesh-and-silicon future, the book's approach prevents it from delivering the substantive analysis these topics demand. Husain’s central framework of "code, consciousness, and control" had real potential to organize a sprawling survey of disconnected technological trends, but Husain never fully develops these concepts or uses them to illuminate the broader and darker implications of the cybernetic future he describes.
The book succeeds best when confronting the uncomfortable realities of this future, such as Husain’s unflinching assessment of privacy rights. These moments of clarity indicate that The Cybernetic Society could have been a truly profound book with deeper investigation of these issues. Instead, readers are left with glimpses of a drastically altered world, ultimately leaving us to wonder what it really means to be human in a cybernetic future.
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