Can Silicon Valley Save Humanity?

At first the news triggered disbelief. Then, for the most part, disapproval: Two of the biggest Silicon Valley companies are ready to pay for employees to freeze their eggs. According to NBC News, which revealed the news last week, Facebook already reimburses up to $20,000 of the costs of the extraction and preservation of eggs, and Apple is getting ready to include this technology in its internal health benefits starting January 2015. In both cases, the justification is the same: promoting the employment of women, which is particularly weak in California high-tech, and helping them better manage their careers.

Beyond the ethical questions — freezing eggs for reasons of personal convenience is prohibited in France, but allowed in the United States — the fact that companies based in California are the first to offer this “service” to their employees is indicative of two ideologies specifically present in Silicon Valley: transhumanism and solutionism. Often looked upon with mocking or condescension from this side of the Atlantic, the two trends nevertheless have a great influence on the planet as a whole because they are supported by the most powerful companies in our digital century.

First, transhumanism. This school of thought, which appeared in the 80s, preaches that scientific and technical progress can — and even should — help improve human beings’ physical and mental capacities. For transhumanists, the convergence of biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, [information technology] and cognitive science, or NBIC, promises a new era in which it will be possible, if not to erase, at least to control with precision, aging, illness and death — at the risk of misappropriating medical innovations originally developed to treat or fix problems. Freezing eggs, first designed to solve infertility problems but then used to slow down the biological clock, is a pretty good example.

Silicon Valley today seems to be where the transhumanist movement is coming to a head. Google, more than Apple and Facebook, is the one that’s most interested in it. At the end of 2012, the search engine giant hired one of its most well-known theorists, Ray Kurzweil, to the position of director of engineering. Artificial intelligence pioneer and provocative futurist, Kurzweil maintains that man and computer will meld, causing humanity to enter into a new era called “the singularity.”

Just a year ago, Google also announced the creation of Calico, a company whose ambition is to prolong human life expectancy by at least 20 years. Its CEO, Arthur Levinson, former head of the biotech firm Genentech, also presides over the board of directors … of Apple. In a California where the cult of the body and [the practice of] plastic surgery is as part of the local culture as the Golden Gate Bridge, the extension of life is seen as the market of the future, especially since it’s the answer to a universal preoccupation: the fear of aging and dying.

Apple and Facebook’s decision symbolizes another strong tendency in Silicon Valley, which the American essayist and author Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism”: the idea that NBIC can provide a solution to all the world’s problems, even the ones farthest away from technology. As the participants at the Women’s Forum of Deauville often highlighted last year, the idea that frozen eggs can contribute to fighting female underemployment in high tech is simplistic and naive. Shortcuts of this type, however, are widespread in California and give rise to impassioned predictions often taken up at a global level. The start-up Modern Meadow maintains that the combination of cell cultures and 3-D printing will resolve the problem of world hunger by allowing the production of artificial meat. The self-driving car will prevent both traffic jams and driving deaths. Big Data will help to detect epidemics before they even start. Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace universities and make access easier for the most culturally poor.

The list can seem endless and, for certain Silicon Valley gurus, it is: During a conference given in October 2012, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, didn’t hesitate to declare, “If we get this right then we can fix all the world’s most pressing problems.” As for entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, cofounder with Ray Kurzweil of Singularity University, he prophesied in 2012 in his book “Abundance” a world where poverty, hunger and sickness will be eradicated forever.

This utopian vision is far from being shared by everyone, including those in the United States. In June 2013, Foreign Policy magazine brilliantly dismantled the solutionist ideas in an article entitled “Can Silicon Valley Save the World?” The authors recognize the extraordinary developments of semi-conductors and the Internet in the last 40 years, as well as their benefits for the poorest countries. But they explained that social and geopolitical reality was far more complicated than California giants imagine: While Twitter and Facebook played a large role in the uprising of Arab countries two years ago, the technology had no usefulness, for example, when it came to replacing the overthrown leaders.

The Takeaways

Transhumanists, like solutionists, think that new technologies can solve all the problems in the world, like hunger, sickness or poverty.

Supported by the most powerful companies of our digital century, these two schools of thought have a growing influence in the world.

Google is especially at the forefront on these subjects.