If you only remember one idea from this whole series, make it this one, because everything turns on it. There is a difference between owning the road and owning the car. Almost every fight we’ve had about technology has been a fight over the road. The thing that kept us free was that we always still owned the car.
Let me back up and give you the map I’m working from. It comes from a legal scholar named Tim Wu, in a book called The Master Switch, and it is the best short history of information technology I know.
Wu looked at the last century and a half of information industries: the telegraph, the telephone, film, radio, television. He noticed they don’t march in a straight line toward freedom. They go in a cycle. A new technology shows up open and wild and decentralized, full of hobbyists and cranks and idealists. Then the money arrives, and it consolidates into a monopoly or a tight little cartel that owns the whole thing. And then, eventually, the cycle reopens. Either a new technology comes along and routes around the monopoly, or the government breaks it up. Open, closed, forced back open. Repeat.
Radio is the cleanest example. In the early 1900s it was the Wild West. Amateurs on ships, kids with transmitters in the garage, everybody broadcasting over everybody else. Gloriously open, and also chaos. When the Titanic went down in 1912, part of the problem was that amateur operators were cluttering the airwaves while people tried to coordinate a rescue. That gave the government its reason to step in and regulate the spectrum, and regulation is what eventually delivered radio into the hands of giants like RCA. The open frontier got fenced. Then television took over and formed its own cartel of three networks. Then cable cracked that open. Then the internet flattened all of it. Around and around.
Now, here’s the toll road.
Picture a monopoly that buys up the only highway. They put up the booths. They charge you a fortune to drive on it. They decide who gets on and who gets turned away. That is the channel being captured, and it is real, and it is bad. You are completely at their mercy to use the road.
But you still own your car. You still know how to drive. The capacity to travel is still yours. The monopoly is holding the road hostage, not your legs. So the day a second road opens, you simply drive over to it, because you brought the car with you the whole time.
That is the secret engine under Wu’s whole cycle, and almost nobody says it out loud. The reason the channel always reopened is that the capability was never actually captured. It stayed with us, idling, waiting for a new road. Western Union owned every telegraph wire in America, and it never once told you what to write on the telegram. AT&T owned the entire phone network, and it never owned a single word of your conversation. The studios owned the cameras, and then the cameras got small and cheap and ended up in your pocket. Over and over, the road got seized and the car stayed ours, so the seizure was always temporary.
This is the thing I need you to hold onto, because it’s about to matter enormously. For two hundred years we have been arguing about who controls the road, and we have been winning that argument slowly, in fits, the way Wu describes. We have never once had to fight about the car. The capacity to make the thing, to write, to speak, to film, to create, was the one possession nobody could repossess. We assumed it always would be. We built our entire optimism on that assumption.
I’m not going to keep you in suspense, because you already know where this is going. The reason artificial intelligence frightens me is not that it captures the road. The road is wide open. You can reach a billion people with a chatbot tomorrow. It’s that for the first time in the whole story, the thing being pulled behind the wall is not the road.
It’s the car.
But “it feels different” is not an argument, and I refuse to make you take my word for it. Before I can show you that the car is being taken, I need a way to actually measure it, something more honest than a bad feeling and a metaphor. So next I’m going to hand you the instrument I built for exactly that.
Next: Five Questions. How to measure whether any technology is setting you free or fencing you in.