How technology changes our sense of right and wrong Juan Enriquez
In an era of extreme polarization,
it’s really dangerous
to talk about right and wrong.
You can be targeted, judged for something
you said 10 years ago, 10 months ago,
10 hours ago, 10 seconds ago.
And that means that those
who think you’re wrong
may burn you at the stake
or those who are on your side
that think you’re not
sufficiently orthodox
may try and cancel you.
As you’re thinking about right and wrong,
I want you to consider three ideas.
What if right and wrong
is something that changes over time.
What if right and wrong is something
that can change because of technology.
What if technology is
moving exponentially?
So as you’re thinking about this concept,
remember human sacrifice
used to be normal and natural.
It was a way of appeasing the gods.
Otherwise the rain wouldn’t come,
the sun wouldn’t shine.
Public executions.
They were common, normal, legal.
You used to take your kids to watch
beheadings in the streets of Paris.
One of the greatest wrongs, slavery,
indentured servitude,
that was something
that was practiced for millennia.
It was practiced across the Incas,
the Mayas, the Chinese,
the Indians in North and South America.
And as you’re thinking about this,
one question is why did something
so wrong last for so long?
And a second question is:
why did it go away?
And why did it go away
in a few short decades in legal terms?
Certainly there was a work
by extraordinary abolitionists
who risked their lives,
but there may be something else happening
alongside these brave abolitionists.
Consider energy
and the industrial revolution.
A single barrel of oil
contains the energy equivalent
of the work of five to 10 people.
Add that to machines,
and suddenly you’ve got
millions of people’s equivalent labor
at your disposal.
You can quit oppressing people
and have a doubling in lifespan
after a flattened lifespan for millennia.
The world economy,
which had been flat for millennia,
all of a sudden explodes.
And you get enormous amounts
of wealth and food and other things
produced by far fewer hands.
Technology changes the way we interact
with each other in fundamental ways.
New technologies like the machine gun
completely changed
the nature of warfare in World War I.
It drove people into trenches.
You were in the British trench,
or you were in the German trench.
Anything in between was no man’s land.
You entered no man’s land.
You were shot. You were killed.
You tried to leave the trench
in the other direction.
Then your own side would shoot you
because you were a deserter.
In a weird way, today’s machine guns
are narrowcast social media.
We’re shooting at each other.
We’re shooting at those we think are wrong
with posts, with tweets, with photographs,
with accusations, with comments.
And what it’s done
is it’s created these two trenches
where you have to be
either in this trench or that trench.
And there’s almost no middle ground
to meet each other,
to try and find some sort of a discussion
between right and wrong.
As you drive around the United States,
you see signs on lawns.
Some say, “Black Lives Matter.”
Others say, “We support the police.”
You very rarely see
both signs on the same lawn.
And yet if you ask people,
most people would probably
support Black Lives Matter
and they would also support their police.
So as you think of these polarized times,
as you think of right and wrong,
you have to understand
that right and wrong changes
and is now changing in exponential ways.
Take the issue of gay marriage.
In 1996, two-thirds of the US population
was against gay marriage.
Today two-thirds is for.
It’s almost 180-degree shift
in the opinion.
In part, this is because of protests,
because people came out of the closet,
because of AIDS,
but a great deal of it
has to do with social media.
A great deal of it has to do
with people out in our homes,
in our living rooms, through television,
through film, through posts,
through people being comfortable enough,
our friends, our neighbors, our family,
to say, “I’m gay.”
And this has shifted opinion
even in some of the most
conservative of places.
Take the Pope.
As Cardinal in 2010,
he was completely against gay marriage.
He becomes Pope.
And three years after the last sentence
he comes out with “Who am I to judge?”
And then today,
he’s in favor of civil unions.
As you’re thinking
about technology changing ethics,
you also have to consider that technology
is now moving exponentially.
As right and wrong changes,
if you take the position, “I know right.
And if you completely disagree with me,
if you partially disagree with me,
if you even quibble with me,
then you’re wrong,”
then there’s no discussion,
no tolerance, no evolution,
and certainly no learning.
Most of us are not vegetarians yet.
Then again, we haven’t had
a whole lot of faster, better,
cheaper alternatives to meat.
But now that we’re getting
synthetic meats,
as the price drops
from 380,000 dollars in 2013
to 9 dollars today,
a great big chunk of people
are going to start becoming
vegetarian or quasi-vegetarian.
And then in retrospect, these pictures
of walking into the fanciest,
most expensive restaurants in town
and walking past racks of bloody steaks
is going to look very different
in 10 years, in 20 years and 30 years.
In these polarized times,
I’d like to revive two words
you rarely hear today:
humility and forgiveness.
When you judge the past,
your ancestors, your forefathers,
do so with a little bit more humility,
because perhaps if you’d been
educated in that time,
if you’d lived in that time,
you would’ve done a lot of things wrong.
Not because they’re right.
Not because we don’t see
they’re wrong today,
but simply because our notions,
our understanding of right and wrong
change across time.
The second word, forgiveness.
Forgiveness is incredibly
important these days.
You cannot cancel somebody
for saying the wrong word,
for having done something 10 years ago,
for having triggered you
and not being a hundred percent right.
To build a community,
you have to build it and talk to people
and learn from people
who may have very different
points of view from yours.
You have to allow them a space
instead of creating a no man’s land.
A middle ground, a creation
and a space of empathy.
This is a time to build community.
This is not a time to continue
ripping nations apart.
Thank you very much.