To deny this is the case, would be to ignore that Silicon Valley and the internet weren’t born out of the sunny idealism of California’s 1960s counterculture. Theirs is a much darker history.

The development of modern tech – from the internet and commercial computers to Siri, GPS and even Google Search – was funded by the US military; Google Earth, which has been banned in a number of countries as a threat to privacy or national security, was originally a tool developed by the CIA.

This history is often overlooked or ignored – even (or perhaps especially) by the tech companies’ own workers. But it has profound implications for how that tech operates today and could be used in the future. Last year, for instance, Google’s involvement in Project Maven – which seeks to automate intelligence gathering and analysis for the Pentagon – led 3,000 employees to protest against their company’s work on ‘weaponising’ AI. You do wonder what these highly educated men and women thought Google had been working on all that time.

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By Keith Spencer

“In the last couple of decades, the industry has gone from solving problems in physical space to bigger issues of cybersecurity,” said Steve Blank – entrepreneur, academic and historian of Silicon Valley. “We’re now wiring the data world for our intelligence agencies.”

It’s easy to be seduced by conspiracy theories like the ‘Google Military Industrial Complex’ when looking at the complex relationship between Silicon Valley and the military. But it’s important that we try to understand this sometimes-stormy relationship in a more sophisticated way, as the global power balance starts to shift. Books such as Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History Of The Internet and Margaret O’Mara’s The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America have made a start.

Levine writes:

“Google is one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world, yet it presents itself as one of the good guys, a company on a mission to make the world a better place and a bulwark against corrupt and intrusive governments all around the globe. And yet I discovered that the company was already a fully-fledged military contractor…And Google isn’t alone.”

The tech giants may want to bury their defence department involvement, but war is in the DNA of the Valley. Take Palantir Technologies, the controversial, $10 billion data analysis firm, set up by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It is said to wield as much real-world power as Google. Its first outside investment came from the CIA: its tools were developed for tracking insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan – and are now used by the FBI, Homeland Security, and police forces across the United States. The New Orleans Police Department notoriously partnered with Palantir to pioneer “precrime”, or predictive policing.

And then it hit Wall Street. When the senior management of JPMorgan lost control of the group whose job it was to identify security threats inside the bank, Palantir’s software was parachuted in as a solution. A unit, led by a former U.S. Secret Service agent named Peter Cavicchia III, used it to aggregate, search and analyse employees’ communications, looking for incriminating evidence. In other words, Palantir’s software – backed by Cavicchia’s paranoia – did what it had been designed to do for the military: it started to hoover up emails, browser histories and GPS from company smart phones – and even digitally record phone conversations.

And it did so with alarming ease.

The project ended when the senior management realised that they were under suspicion as well.

Palantir’s ‘War On Terror’ technology has now found a wide range of uses – from tackling fraud and abuse, to understanding how people use data. The company’s clients include the World Food Programme, Airbus and the World Atomic Energy Authority.

Further reading

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By Jonathan Tepper

The problem with all of this is that the dark side of the Valley has no physical, visible manifestation: there aren’t the chain link fences, security guards or use-of-lethal-force signs that you find at military installations such as Los Alamos, Skunk Works and Area 51. The original, small-scale nature of its work meant that it never had any oppressive physical presence.

In fact the Valley did have its secret facilities, according to Steve Blank, but these could be hidden away in a desert on another continent. (Blank describes working in a top-secret facility back in the 1970s whose technology was 30 years ahead of the commercial industry: “Nothing I would work on in the next 30 years was as bleeding edge.”)

We don’t see that. We see the gimmicky, giant-sized deck chairs and ping pong tables that the Valley uses to reinforce that hippy-libertarian founding myth. But the Californian orange orchards weren’t cut down in the race to build microchips – or to make room for giant deck chairs. They were felled in order to develop the microwave and radar technology which would defeat the Nazis’ air defence systems, and then to warn of Soviet missile launches and spy on their air defences. The Pentagon was the only body with the resources and the time to fund the kind of future-shaking research needed to win these hot and cold wars.

Stanford University became, in effect, the research laboratory for the American military-industrial complex. The now forgotten Fred Terman built up the 800-strong Electronic Warfare Laboratory at Harvard during the war – and, when the war ended, returned to Stanford to do the same again. It was routine for theses there to be classified.

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The first IPO (initial public offering) out of Silicon Valley was in 1956 for a company called Varian, which sold microwave tubes for military applications. The first contracts for Fairchild Semiconductor were to help build the bomber and missiles that could lead to nuclear Armageddon – as well as take America to the moon. Lockheed Martin arrived in the Valley in 1956 to build missiles and then spy satellites – and quickly became the largest employer in the valley. The Valley was said to be then full of Soviet spies, as it is undoubtedly a target for Russian and Chinese  spies today.

Then, in 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik and the US military panicked. The result was the Advanced Research Projects Administration – DARPA – set up to close the technology gap.

The Internet grew out of the Arpanet, funded by the transfer of a million dollars from a ballistic missile defence programme, which was, in turn, funded by DARPA. Its main aim was not surveillance, but to ensure that the US stayed ahead of its Soviet enemies in science and technology. The researchers behind it hoped that academics would work more effectively together if their computers were connected. The military did have a ‘secure capability’ on the Arpanet – which well have been used to transfer classified data acquired through surveillance – but there was no system of surveillance. Yet.

However, Levine pushes this argument further than most commentators have been willing to do. “The internet was hard wired to be a surveillance tool from the start,” he wrote in Surveillance Valley. “No matter what we use the network for today – dating, directions, encrypted chat, email, or just reading the news – it always had a dual nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.”

There were even those in the intelligence services who dreamed of a “a sort of early warning radar for human societies, a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them”. It is hard not to hear the echo of this idea in the work of companies like Google and Palantir.

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The Central Intelligence Agency set up its own DARPA-like organisation in 1999 “to ensure that the CIA remains at the cutting edge of information technology advances and capabilities”. Now known as In-Q-Tel, this fund invested in Keyhole, a satellite imagery company. That was sold to Google in 2005, where it became Google Earth. In-Q-Tel also invested in Palantir and helped it secure contracts to work with the US government on cybersecurity.

And then there’s Siri. The little voice that emanates from iPhones across the globe was developed from a project backed by SRI International, a non-profit research organisation with funding from DARPA. The goal was to integrate artificial intelligence into a virtual assistant that could learn and evolve by itself. “[It] was an extremely ambitious project, beyond what could be done commercially,” said Adam Cheyer, a Siri co-founder.

A look at the Pentagon’s latest National Defence Strategy identifies eight commercial technologies that the US military wants in on in the future, including advanced computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics – and we can see this agenda in Project Maven, perhaps the Pentagon’s biggest high-tech project to date.

The Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team – to give Project Maven its proper name – uses AI to automate the analysis of huge amounts of drone data. The goal is to improve on their work of identifying threats and tracking enemy movements, by detecting anomalies that the human eye may miss. With the help of Amazon and Microsoft, it is already operating in least five secret locations in the Middle East and Africa.

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To build on the success of Maven, the Defense Department has launched a $10 billion tender for an enormous cloud storage centre to store all this data. They have given it the code name JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) – and this is a contract that all the Valley wants a cut of.

“We’ve been told again and again that we are in the grips of a liberating technology, a tool that decentralises power, topples entrenched bureaucracies, and brings more democracy and equality to the world,” writes Levine.

“But spend time looking at the nitty-gritty business details of the internet and the story gets darker and less optimistic. If the Internet is a truly a revolutionary break from the past, why are companies like Google in bed with the cops and the spies?”

We would do well to remember that technology tested on the streets of Basra sooner-or-later finds it way onto our high streets. War is at the core of the tech that’s integral to modern life and risks propelling it to a darker future.

This is not hyperbole. There is a mountain of evidence to back it up.

Like its Silicon Valley rivals, Netflix used to keep its subscriber numbers to itself. Now it has become a little more open – and the numbers are big. In January, in a signal to Wall Street about how much more Netflix can grow, Netflix told investors that their shows account for 10% of TV screen time in the United States.

The platform now has close to 140 million subscribers and they are adding eight million every quarter. The recent hit Netflix movie Bird Box has been watched by 80 million people since it was released just before Christmas. Hit shows such as You and Sex Education are also highly popular: 40 million households were expected to see each show in its first four weeks on Netflix. Thanks to the ‘Netflix effect’, the number of cancelled TV licences in the UK spiked for the first time in six years.

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Research published by Ofcom last month showed that children overwhelmingly prefer YouTube and Netflix to any other platforms. The children in the study did occasionally watch platforms such as the BBC’s iPlayer and network television, but they saw them as less relevant. In fact, watching this kind of ‘traditional’ television was associated with those dreaded people: parents.

Disney’s purchase of Fox for $52 billion shows that traditional media corporations know they are fighting for survival. Netflix has recently cancelled the last of its (Disney-owned) Marvel shows in what is easy to see as a “show of force” by the streaming service. Our cash-starved public sector broadcasters are contemplating banding together on a new shared streaming platform in an attempt to fend off Netflix. But it is the lengths Netflix will go to in growing their subscriber base that should horrify us.

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On 1 January a story dropped on FT.com that should be seen as a warning about Netflix’s power. The headline read simply: ‘Netflix pulls episode of comedy show in Saudi Arabia.’ We don’t know the specific lines from Hasan Minhaj’s show that offended the Crown Prince; the American comedian said so much about Saudi Arabia that the thin-skinned autocrat could have found offensive. Perhaps it was his comment that Saudi Arabia was “the boy-band manager of 9/11”. Or it could simply have been the fact that the young American referred to the Saudi ruler by his initials, MBS.

Executives say they received a “valid legal request” from the Saudi authorities to take down episode 2 of Patriot Act from the streaming service in Saudi Arabia. And, in a worrying act of political self-censorship, they did so, even if an edited version remained up on YouTube.

Whatever the specific source of distress for the Crown Prince, executives at Netflix clearly didn’t want to upset him. Interestingly, in the same episode, Minhaj also criticises Silicon Valley for “swimming in Saudi cash” and urges tech companies to stop taking investment from the kingdom. It has been estimated that the Saudis have invested over $6 billion directly into the Valley, and more indirectly through funds such as SoftBank and BlackRock. The New York based fund is one of Netflix’s largest institutional investors. It is known to have close economic ties to Saudi Arabia. Larry Fink, its CEO, has described himself as a friend of Saudi Arabia.

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These behaviours are driven by a desperate need to grow – fast. This is what makes the entertainment platform vulnerable to pressure from authoritarian regimes. It’s not a surprise that Netflix will bend over backwards for ‘MBS’ when roughly two-thirds of the population of the oil rich desert kingdom is under 30 – a source of wealthy new subscribers for the platform – and Silicon Valley is awash with Saudi cash and the soft influence that it buys.

This is not the first time the entertainment giant has bowed to the demands of autocrats. In Singapore the service took down three episodes of different programmes after it received a similar request from authorities who didn’t like drug use being portrayed in a positive way.

In these decisions our favourite streaming service has displayed a cavalier approach to freedom of speech – and to its responsibilities as a major, and potentially dominant, cultural medium.

It’s an approach reminiscent of Facebook at its worst. Netflix’s critics claim that the corporation’s capitulation is fuelling digital authoritarianism by emboldening autocrats across the world in their attempts to control global streaming services as they do their national television.

Netflix shares another similarity with Big Tech gone bad. Mark Zuckerberg’s quote “Move fast and break things” – once exciting, now quite chilling – would fit as well on the wall of Netflix’s HQ as it does on Facebook’s. Netflix must cannibalise or destroy traditional cinema and television in order to achieve the growth it needs.

The giant was happy to release its recent films Bird Box and Roma in the cinema just long enough to qualify for awards such as the Oscars – success in which will drive subscriptions. While consumers can save money by watching a film on a streaming service at home rather than in the cinema – and producers can be ‘bought’ by the big budgets Netflix offers – something is lost when you watch a film on a TV, laptop or mobile. The collective experience and immersive storytelling offered at the cinema is powerful. For the moment, at least, traditional cinema is still attracting audiences.

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The sheer amount of video Netflix is producing is turning into a “raging flood” that threatens to sweep away quality control, and our beloved public service broadcasters with it. Screen-testing new shows via pilots may not be a perfect process, but it at least offers a base level of quality. Netflix doesn’t commission pilots. It doesn’t have the time, if it wants to conquer the world. Instead, it commissions whole seasons at a time. Insiders say there are now so many people who can greenlight a show at Netflix that it acts like 10 to 15 different production companies.

This is where consumers lose out. By not piloting shows, Netflix stands accused of cancelling more than would be expected of a traditional broadcaster. The shows Netflix has cancelled include the expensive Sense8, the critically acclaimed Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and flops like Girlboss. In fact, lists of all the shows Netflix cancels make the headlines each year. The cost of these cancelled shows is then passed on to consumers through higher subscription charges and – in the future – perhaps even the introduction of advertising.

For big-name showrunners such as Ryan Murphy, the man responsible for American Horror Story, Netflix offers the chance to satisfy their wildest fantasies. But let’s be honest, $300 million for a five-year contract to produce whatever you want is not a recipe for quality. It is a recipe for a great deal of self-indulgent rubbish. “I’m building a team that is orientated to say yes in a town that is built to say no,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer. He’s not kidding.

Like the other out-of-control behemoths, the streaming giant even has its own bizarre Darwinian culture that is credited with enabling the company to grow so fast – and which may now be amplifying its mistakes. It’s called “radical transparency”or “the Netflix Way”. Former employees have called it “a culture of fear.”

If you make a mistake, you are asked to “sunshine” the incident in front of your peers. This is Netflix lingo for standing up in front of your colleagues to tell them what you did and even apologise to them. If you are a manager, you are told to apply a “keeper test” to your staff – asking yourself whether you would fight to keep a given employee. If managers don’t fire people, whistleblowers say, they risk being fired themselves. And even if you’ve been fired, you have to go through a merciless post-mortem in front of your former colleagues. It is a brutal recipe to ensure the survival of who the company deems the fittest.

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Netflix has to grow fast for a simple reason. The streaming service may be a 20-year-old company, but it has the business plan of a start-up. Like Uber, Netflix has to grow at ever-increasing rates to justify its valuation, while it is making only a small profit and carrying massive debt. This exponential growth depends on a feedback loop: subscriber numbers increase rapidly, which fund the digital “box sets” Netflix needs to keep existing subscribers happy, which attracts new subscribers and increases revenue even more.

Keeping subscribers means that, just like Facebook or YouTube, Netflix has to work out ever better ways to hack our brains. It already personalises recommended shows, and the landing cards for each show. It even selects the shows it suggests to you according to what time you’re on the app. If you log in late at night, you’re more likely to be shown shorter programmes, or those that you haven’t finished watching.

Netflix needs to work out how to manipulate us into staying on the platform even longer, in preparation for the day when subscriber numbers plateau. This would make Netflix even more valuable – and should give it the ability to raise prices as it penetrates our lives more deeply.

It now turns out that, without our knowledge, Netflix has been watching you while you watch-play the interactive show ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’. The choices you make in the show – for example between Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs– are being saved by Netflix to improve its shows in the future and, presumably, what it markets to you.

Like the characters in Netflix’s hit show, we may think we are in The Good Place, but it turns out we are in The Bad Place. We love Netflix, the shows it produces, the choice it gives us and – for my children – it is hard to imagine life without it. But we loved Facebook once, before we knew what they were really up to.

Silicon Valley is famous for its technological innovation. It’s less well known for being at the ideological cutting edge.

Two new technology-based ideologies that have been born in the Valley are transhumanism and posthumanism. It is hard to understand one without the other, and the boundaries between these two, still rather rough, sets of beliefs are very blurred.

Transhumanism has been described by Francis Fukuyama as one of the greatest threats to the idea of human equality and says that transhumanists are “just about the last group I’d like to see live forever”. When I wrote about transhumanism for Wired back in 2014, many people thought I was a lunatic. Then, in the 2016 presidential election Zoltan Istvan ran against Donald Trump as the Transhumanist Party’s candidate, and this year, Mark O’Connell’s book To Be a Machine won the Wellcome Book Prize.

It has been shaped by science-fiction, but the origins of transhumanism can be found as far back as the 1900s, or even earlier to the quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the search for the Fountain of Youth. The first transhumanists formally met at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s and quickly became the centre of transhumanist thinking. It now is a global movement with Italian Giuseppe Vatinno the first elected transhumanist member of parliament.

Today, transhumanists count among their member’s influential figures such as futurist Raymond Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the venture capitalist most people love to hate. Oxford University’s own Professor Nick Bostrom is co-cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association and author of the New York Times best seller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which has been recommended by the likes of Bill Gates.

If you haven’t yet heard, transhumanism is a rather optimistic set of beliefs – a movement to liberate humanity – clustered around the core idea that technology will take us beyond the physical and intellectual limitations of being human. Technologies like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, robotics, AI and digital brain emulation will transform what it means to be human. Transhumanism of a sort is implied in the soft sell for self-driving cars, virtual reality and any kind of AI.

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Transhumanism, critics argue, has become one of the de facto ideologies of the Silicon Valley establishment in that it justifies the Valley’s culture of ‘move fast, break things and make as much money as possible’ – because ‘hey, what we are doing is liberating humanity’.

What is often left out of this explainer by those who want transhumanism to be taken seriously are the ‘wackier’ elements. The belief that this transformation will occur through the actual physical fusion of technology and humanity by body modification and enhancements. Or the belief that the exponential growth of technology is taking us on a journey far beyond our understanding of what it is to be human today, to a point when, in a literal sense, we become posthuman.

Our posthuman self could be an immortal digital entity able to download its consciousness into a synthetic body of its choice on Earth, or a robot exploring the moons of Jupiter. It could mean that we alter our very biology to enhance our bodies or become a new species of posthuman. Other researchers have wondered if there is the need for an international treaty to save the endangered human.

Transhumanists call the almost mystical moment after which this fusion is possible “The Singularity“.

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Then there is the belief in the inevitability of an AI takeover. This is a set of beliefs often confusingly called posthumanism. Rather than thinking about beyond humanity, this kind of posthumanism is more focused on the elimination of humanity. It is a darker, more extreme and pessimistic alternative to transhumanism. It shares many ideas with transhumanism such as the exponential growth of technology and a belief in The Singularity. But it removes the human agency behind technological change and believes in the inevitability of the creation of a superintelligent AI that replaces us in a very deterministic way.

According to this way of thinking, technology is evolving at an exponential rate driven by the constant need of capitalism to expand and it is inevitable that at some point along this curve the technological singularity will occur. This is the moment when humans create an artificial intelligence that surpasses the intellectual abilities of men and women, even a genius like Stephen Hawking. It is the last machine that humans will ever make.

With this level of intellectual firepower, the machine acquires the ability not only to reproduce itself but also to improve itself. The resulting “Intelligence Explosion” leads to a runaway cycle of self-improving AI that results in a powerful, superintelligent computer that surpasses all human intelligence. Rather than physically fusing with this technology, the human era comes to an end in the Darwinian nightmare of the human race’s replacement by a superior intelligence that we ourselves have created.

At best we should just give a fatalistic shrug of our collective shoulders to our inevitable self-extermination. At worst, it is a suicide pill, since it is our evolutionary duty, believers argue, to create the AI that will replace us. Some posthumanists would even go so far as to argue that it would be a cosmic tragedy if we stopped this from happening.

Cosmists, as their name suggests, are in the ‘suicide pill’ camp. Computer scientist Hugo de Garis argues that humanity must build these “godlike super creatures”, which they call artilects, even if it risks the destruction of the human species. The assumption behind this is that the life of ordinary humans – whom they call Terrans – is worth less than that of artilects.

Cosmists like de Garis have started to argue that the drive to create these new godlike creatures will lead to the first “gigadeath war” – a war that kills billions of people. They believe that the war will start when ordinary humans try to prevent the creation of these superintelligent machines, and that the only way to survive alongside these new creatures is to become cyborgs.

These crazy-sounding beliefs are not, of course, universally accepted by the technology community, and there are different versions of each. There are also transhumanists like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom who are aware of the risks of such a process of technological transformation. Others argue that The Singularity is already happening. What matters is that there are transhumanists and posthumanists in positions to decide where investment goes in the Valley and elsewhere.

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Biohackers who try to alter their DNA at home or upgrade their own body with a neural interface may make the headline. But Peter Thiel has invested millions into biotechnology start-ups in search of a way to cheat death. Then there is Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others. It is reported to be developing implantable brain-computer cyborg-like interfaces that we see in sci-fi movies. It may even help humanity stay in control of AI.

‘Mind uploading’, otherwise known as whole brain emulation, has attracted millions of dollars of investment from the billionaires of Silicon Valley and beyond. A leading venture capitalist told me that he is not worried about the AI research carried out in public in universities so much as the research that is going on in unregulated private laboratories.

In the end, we need to know what the researchers believe because to a posthuman the things that matter to us today, such as the privacy of our data, the health of our democracy and the survival of our local bookshop can too easily be seen as an outdated – as all too ‘human’ concepts. The question is, do you?

“In the end, it’s not about intelligent machines taking over,” says Brett Frischmann, co-author of Re-Engineering Humanity. “I don’t really care about the engineering of artificial intelligence or really intelligent machines. I’m more concerned about the engineering of unintelligent humans.”

Like an episode of Black Mirror, the story that he and Evan Selinger tell in their rather dystopian book begins in small, seemingly insignificant ways.

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When I try to login to a particular newspaper I am usually confronted by a picture of a roadside scene. Over the image is a grid. I am then challenged to prove that I am human by clicking on each box that contains parts of a crosswalk, which I complete with only a grumble, more about the Americanism rather than anything else. I don’t for one minute think about what the data I am generating is being used for. When I have done this, I am presented with a second picture. It’s only when this task has been completed that I can read the story that I am paying a fee every month to access.

Sound familiar? This challenge is, of course, a CAPTCHA. It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Ironically, the original Turing test was designed by British computer scientist Alan Turing to be administered by humans to robots as a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like behaviour. In the case of CAPTCHA, it is a machine that is testing a human’s ability to exhibit human like capabilities. In a sense it is testing the mechanisation of humans.

This automated stimulus-response test would be familiar to any psychologist who has watched rats scurry around a maze. At least the rats get a piece of cheese for their trouble.

The problem for us humans is that we don’t react in this automated manner only when faced by a CAPTCHA, but to a whole range of other software too. The automatic tick of a box – whether literal or metaphorical – becomes our default, predictable response when faced by choices where we should be paying more attention to the decisions we are making.

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We automatically tick the box to agree to Terms and Conditions online without ever reading what they say. We like the piece of Fake News on Facebook without even a quick Google to check out the story. We strap a Fitbit on to our wrist and strive to meet the 10,000 steps a day goal while our private data gets hoovered up to who knows where and we get used to being under constant surveillance. We change our coffee brand so we can have the pleasure of re-ordering it though Alexa, the virtual assistant that works through the Amazon Echo smart speaker – the use of which seems to infect families “like a happy virus.”

The result of this conditioning is that we become more like a simple machine – or a reluctant piece of technology – that can be nudged, shoved, or even programmed, by the coders of the apps and their corporate masters towards the goal that has been chosen for us. Many people just trust that Big Tech is looking after our interests rather than its own, or simply shrug their shoulders and enjoy the benefits of the app or smartwatch anyway.

The problem is that we are so enjoying the happiness, or “cheap bliss” – as Frischmann and Selinger call it – released by our freedom from these mundane tasks of reading a contract, shopping for coffee or recording our exercise that we don’t notice that the technology is starting to blur the line between who is the tool and who is the maker. It doesn’t occur to us that “the things that we use aren’t neutral”.

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The voices that warn us are drowned out or dismissed. When we do notice, we become so tied up with the swirl of controversy around a company like Cambridge Analytica, a platform like Facebook or even just social networks in general that we don’t notice that the problem is the much bigger system.

CAPTCHA, Fitbit and Alexa are all part of a network of smart digital technologies that may have different features and different effects on us, but which are together enmeshing every aspect of our lives. Even if we do realise the power of the Internet of Things, it is easier to close our eyes and give ourselves up to the technological momentum.

The fear that we will become like our tools isn’t new – Max Weber famously argued that the drive for efficiency by large bureaucracies was dehumanising work – but for Frischmann and Selinger never has this outcome been so likely, nor the consequences so profound. The cubicles of the typical open-plan office can make us feel like worker ants, but that distinctly steam-age form of dehumanisation is nothing compared to the digital variety – the former clocks off at 5pm, the latter sits on your bedside table. The two writers insist they are not anti-technology, more cautious about its likely outcomes.

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The impact of this network of powerful smart devices driven by algorithms designed to meet – and even anticipate – our needs cannot be understated. These little plastic boxes seem to quickly, and sinisterly, infiltrate every aspect of our lives, even the way we bring up our children. We think we are training the algorithms, when really we are the ones being trained. By the time we think “how could I have ever lived without it?”, we have moved a couple more steps closer to losing our humanity.

Frischmann and Selinger call this process “outsourcing”. Outsourcing, they argue, attacks what it is be human. When we let algorithms, robots and consumer devices take over what were once fundamental human functions – like making a decision – we lose our free will, our ability to act independently in the world. With less effort needed by us, we experience less of the action itself, and before long the behaviour becomes less intentional, and we do it more automatically.

By giving up control like this, we feel less responsible for how things turn out and conversely feel less of a buzz when they turn out well. Any understanding we may have had of how a process works is lost. We become dependent on the platform or app, a spectator in a life programmed by our devices, the engineers who programmed them and the corporations that own the lot.

The venture capital backed June Intelligent Oven is a case in point. It runs on AI, deep learning and many, many sensors and cameras. Needless to say, Alexa is built-in. The second-generation of the oven, whose manufacturers compare to the Tesla Model-S, has just been released and even has food recognition technology built in. The drop in price from $1500 to $500 means it is likely to be in your kitchen soon.

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The only problem is, as one reviewer points out, we might lose our ability to ever cook again: “When you cook salmon wrong, you learn about cooking it right. When the June cooks salmon wrong, its findings are uploaded, aggregated and averaged into a June database that you hope will allow all June ovens to get it right next time.”

Like its corporate-world namesake, we justify outsourcing to ourselves, our friends and our children in the name of efficiency. These smart networks reduce the transaction cost of doing something to close to zero. This reduction means that stuff happens fast and gives us what feels like a big boost to our productivity. The only problem is that going to the gym or spending time with the children can start to feel like going to work. It is Taylorism gone mad. (Taylorism was the first attempt to apply science to improve labour efficiency.)

We can’t win. The cheap bliss that the automatic use of these devices gives us is manufactured by the same people who programme our lives. Happiness, satiation, call it what you like, is a feeling that is itself engineered through techno-social engineering. We can’t escape it. The danger that the authors of Re-Engineering Humanity highlight is that the most efficient way to keep billions of people might be to engineer their preferences to expect very little and then give them only slightly more than that.

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How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

Resistance is possible, the book tells us, perhaps with a little less confidence. To counter the outsourcing of our humanity, we need to consciously understand that we are shaped – even manufactured – by the built environment we live in whether a tower block or the Internet of Things.

Like the resident action groups who take responsibility for the estates that they live on, we need to start taking responsibility for the design and use of our digital ‘estate’. The best way to do this, the authors propose, may be to engineer delays back into our systems.

“Friction is resistance,” Frischmann thinks, because it gives us time to stop and think. Time that allows us to acquire our own beliefs, values and attitudes rather than an algorithm. “This is free will in action.”

If we don’t start to take back control, then the danger is that we lose what the writers call “our freedom to be off. Our freedom from programming, conditioning and control engineered by others.”

Today, the $740 billion former bookseller’s tentacles stretch far beyond e-commerce: into bricks-and-mortar retailing, air cargo, cloud computing and AI – technologies that are, or will become, the backbone of countries such as the USA and the UK. It has combined traditional market dominating techniques with an unrivalled understanding of its customers’ online behaviour, to awesome effect. And concern about monopolistic behaviour is increasingly being voiced.

Further reading

Can't we stop data monsters from devouring their rivals?

By David Morris

Everyone used to understand what a monopoly was, and nearly everyone, other than monopolists themselves, understood that it represented the failure of capitalism rather than its apex. When one company dominates a market then the good things that come from competition between producers, such as quality, variety and innovation, are likely to come to an end. Without competition, there’s little incentive to do any of these expensive things, and both consumers and the wider economy loses out.

Then in the 1970s a new idea emerged from America’s law schools that turned this thinking on its head. The size of the company no longer mattered: the only criterion by which it should be judged, or a takeover blocked, was consumer welfare. To put it crudely, a firm like Amazon could be as big as it wanted as long as it kept prices low. Today to be concerned about the ‘bigness’ of companies is to go back to the popularist goals of the past, argues Professor Daniel Crane of the University of Michigan.

By the second decade of the 21st century, that reinterpretation of the law has had – if you are cynical – its intended effect. We are living in a new age of concentration, where a few corporate giants like Amazon dominate the economy. The ratio between the cost of a good or service and its selling price in the wider economy – often seen as evidence of market dominance – has risen in advanced economies by 43% since the 1980s.  The combined revenue of the tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft – is larger than the GDP of more than 90% of the world’s nations. Start-ups are even founded with the sole purpose of being acquired by one of these Big Five.

Further reading

Who commands the internet?

By Carl Miller

Then, in 2016, an unknown law student decided to dust down some forgotten textbooks hidden away on the top floor of her university library. Early in 2017, Lina Khan published ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’ in the Yale Law Journal. The one word that Big Tech didn’t want to see in the public conversation – monopoly – was back, and at the worst moment. For the first time, Big Tech was caught in a bipartisan squeeze in Congress as real political pressure built up over the abuse of customer data and fake news.

Khan’s argument was simple. Once laws that were designed to prevent one company controlling a market had been pushed to one side, companies like Amazon were able to gain market dominance through anticompetitive practices. This gave them control of the infrastructure that many businesses and other parts of the economy depend on. Khan suggests that either Amazon should be regulated more forcefully to ensure competition – or that it should be recognised as a natural monopoly like the water or gas supply, and run as a publicity utility.

Now, Amazon, Google and the other modern monopolies have a battle on their hands. Worryingly, it looks like they have a formidable range of weapons to fight it with – and Khan and her allies have already been labelled as “hipster radicals.”

Further reading

How the big tech companies are eating free markets

By Charlotte Pickles

Big Tech’s lobbying dates back 20 years, but the scale of it has grown significantly. In America, five years ago Amazon spent $3.5 million on lobbying, last year they spent $13 million. In just a few years, Amazon’s lobbying operations have gone from almost nothing to rival Google. To defend its sprawling empire from the politicians that are circling the tech giant has assembled the biggest lobbying team of any tech company in Washington: 28 in-house lobbyists, compared to Apple’s and Facebook’s eight. 

Perhaps more disturbing is the influence that companies like Amazon and Google have that you can’t see. Both regulatory capture, where the regulators identify too closely with the companies they are trying to control, and policy capture, when commercial interests so infiltrate governments that they can affect the design of measures relevant to their activities, should concern us.

Since 2005, concern has grown over Google’s political influence after research showed that it had poached at least 65 government officials from all over the European Union. During the same period, 15 ‘Googlers’ have been appointed to government positions in Europe, thus penetrating to the heart of the decision-making process. In the UK, Google has targeted for recruitment civil servants from key parts of the government machine like the Treasury and No. 10. This revolving door between politics, tech and regulators is a key characteristic of crony capitalism.

More from this author

The book the tech titans love

By Mark Piesing

Then, of course, there is the ‘dark money’ – the think tanks, research institutions and publications who enjoy their journey on Big Tech’s gravy train and can be used to shape the debate. Last year a critic of Google was fired from the New America Foundation, when he posted an article in support of the European Commission’s antitrust regulators. The think tank has received over $20 million from Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Google, his family trust and the company itself.

Then in July 2018, US activists really woke up to the power of Amazon, and the damage it could do to democracy, when the company used its influence to repeal a law passed by its home city of Seattle that imposed a small employee ‘head tax’ on large corporations. The purpose of the tax was to fund affordable housing in a city whose horrendously high costs are partly down to the very same tech companies. Many were left with the feeling that Amazon was too powerful to tax and regulate.

If politicians can be persuaded to act, the big question is how to tackle the problem. The traditional anti-monopoly medicine would be to break up these large conglomerates into their smaller component pieces. Amazon could easily be split into retail, cloud, logistics and video production. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) could be broken up into divisions such as Google Search and YouTube.

Further reading

How to bring the tech giants to heel

By Mat Lawrence

Others are thinking about an updating of the vision behind the BBC. In Britain, the think tank IPPR argues that the digital economy should be reorganised as a “digital commonwealth”, to be an open, collective resource for the common good. The major digital platform companies would be regulated like broadcasters and mobile providers. Where large digital companies have the advantage of existing data when moving into a new market, such as banking or mobility, they would be compelled to open it up for others to use. And a new public service corporation would ensure that public data is widely available for innovation and public good.

This is already being done in other industries. In the energy industry, consumers who share their data with new firms such as Switchd can already get better access to cheaper prices, and the process will only get better, faster and more automated as energy suppliers share more of their data digitally. Banks and other financial institutions are also opening up their data for others to access, use and share. Customers are doing something similar by sharing data from their accounts with third parties they trust.

In the end, the convenience of Amazon’s platform has turned us into lazy consumers who would give up almost anything in return for same day delivery. But if we are not careful it won’t just be the High Street that we have abandoned. Big Tech has the will and the wallet to bypass traditional regulators, and that leaves few options other than to turn them into social enterprises that serve the common good.

In 1911, the breakup of John D Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil Company prevented one man from having a stranglehold on the fuel that America depended on. If data is the new oil, then perhaps it’s time we stopped a handful of men from controlling the lifeblood of every advanced nation.

Further reading

Time to topple the technopoly

By Charlotte Pickles

Hans Rosling was a Swedish doctor, statistician, “data rock-star” (thanks to the advent of TED talks) and the author of the bestseller, Factfulness. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for 2018. In it, he explores why we get so many facts about the world wrong and what we can do about it – encouraging the reader to think beyond the obvious.

Since its publication in April, the book has acquired must-read status among Silicon Valley executives, thanks in no small part to repeated endorsements by Bill Gates. A friend of Rosling’s, he described it as “one of the most important books that I have ever read and an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world”. Gates – as only a billionaire can – then went further than most of us do with our favourite books. He gave a copy of Factfulness to all new graduates of colleges and universities in the USA, if they registered with his website.

It’s not surprising Gates loved it. Rosling’s counter-intuitive optimism is very Silicon Valley. The book recalled the golden age of the high-tech hub – the era when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, could make “Don’t be evil” the motto of their company, and Steve Jobs’s Apple could have as its advertising slogan “Think Different” without (too much) widespread mockery.

Further reading

Test article

By Oliver Kamm

Like Jobs, the Swede, who died in 2017 (his children finished the book on his behalf) was part missionary and part showman. His mission was to shake us out of the state of ignorance that convinces us the world is getting worse – when, in fact, it is getting better.

Our overdramatic worldview, in his account, misses the big story of human progress. It manufactures a topsy-turvy reality, a “mega misconception”, whereby global poverty is growing, when in fact it is reducing, levels of education are worse rather than better, and violent crime is going up when the opposite is true. “The world has moved on,” Rosling says. “Our worldview hasn’t.”

He enjoyed playing with his audience to prove this. His preferred set-up was to give his audience of medical students, scientists or investment bankers a multiple-choice quiz to test their level of ignorance. Routinely, they would do “worse than chimpanzees” in answering questions designed to demonstrate his somewhat controversial idea that the “gap” between the rich and the developing world no longer existed. By “worse than chimpanzees” he meant that his audience’s results were worse than random, owing – he believed – to ignorance on a global scale how much the world was getting better. Most of the population, he argues, are somewhere in the middle.

Further reading

How to bring the tech giants to heel

By Mathew Lawrence

Even his audience at the World Economic Forum at Davos demonstrated a level of ignorance that was worse than that of a bunch of apes. Global political and business leaders, it turns out, did not know that the average world life expectancy is 70, that 88% of children are vaccinated against disease, or that in 2100 there will be 2bn children below the age of 15 — the same number as today.

To demonstrate his point, Rosling would use animated graphs. Multicoloured bubbles changed in size as they moved across the screen to show that, for example, life conditions in Sweden at the time of his birth in 1948 had similar levels of health and wealth as Egypt today, or that today the life expectancy and income of people in countries as different as China and Egypt are close.

By the end of his life Rosling had become culturally part of the same world as Silicon Valley. He rejected the “lone genius” stereotype, but was a TED talk phenomenon, had his own army of cultish followers and addressed Davos on sustainable development. He even sold the presentation software that he helped design to Google.

That same limitless optimism and energy bursts from the book. Along with a desire to shock. And each chapter starts with a multiple-choice test. In many ways its technological determinism reads like a therapy-cum-self-help book for hassled Silicon Valley executives who just want to be told that they are doing a good job.

Further reading

The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

Rosling sets out to make these execs feel better about themselves. He shows how ignorance stops us from seeing the amazing story of human progress, largely created by technology. We can’t appreciate its wonders because of human instincts that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Just as our bodies still want to hoard fat and sugar, we still want gossip and dramatic stories, which, in the past, transmitted information that might make the difference between living and dying. This craving for drama then helps to create an overdramatic worldview.

He maintains we are in a systematic state of ignorance about how much technology is making our lives better because selective reporting prevents positive news stories from making the front page. Instead, journalists, activists and lobbyists produce an unrelenting torrent of “bad news” that mislead us into thinking that the number of people dying from disasters is on the rise when it is on the decline, that there are more hungry people in the world when there are fewer, or in reverse, that there are fewer babies being immunised when there are more.

Negative news, he believes, shapes our worldview because our instincts mean that we pay more attention to scary things. The doom-mongers and manipulators he identifies are, of course, the same journalists and activists who frequently have Big Tech billionaires in their sights.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

The problem is that Rosling’s optimism makes him comparably selective when it come to criticism of the tech tycoons and their products. Strangely, the possible hazards of social media and the other products of his billionaire friends are largely unaddressed, despite accusations that the algorithms they have created are amplifying fake news, widening divisions in society and undermining faith in the very facts to which Rosling points. He once said:

“I use normal statistics that are compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion. I am right, and you are wrong.”

Even if you ignore the messianic tone, Rosling may have been selective about the facts himself. Rather like the journalists or activists he disdained, Rosling, according to some critics, put a positive spin on “big picture stats” to back up his argument, while ignoring evidence that suggests that life is still grim for many.

He also glosses over some inconvenient facts: the population in many countries is growing; world hunger is on the rise; and while more girls are being educated, women with advanced degrees still have higher rates of unemployment than men. Almost half of humanity still lives in conditions that the average American, European, or Japanese would find unacceptable.

Rosling argues that the world is becoming more democratic even though many people don’t feel that it is: China’s economic growth has certainly not been matched by democratic reform. He shows us graphs of the numbers of washing machines in the world to demonstrate human progress, but has material progress made us happier? Others read the same graphs as an illustration of unsustainable growth that is destroying the planet. Some might say we were happier as a species when we lived in small, sustainable village communities – or even as simple hunter-gatherers.

Further reading

Silicon Valley's 'suicide pill' for mankind

By Mark Piesing

Most glaring of all, Factfulness shows no scepticism about the tech billionaires who have helped to create today’s uncertainties – which some might call chaos. Instead, it offers a sop to weary executives who have left it too late to buy a bunker in New Zealand, by assuring them that the apocalypse probably won’t happen. Their ideas and products, he says, are improving everything: technology is bringing our society and species together rather than breaking them apart. And any nagging doubt the techies themselves might feel isn’t their guilty conscience speaking, but down to the media.

Only instinctive, fearful thinking, according to Rosling, would suggest technology is likely to have some negative effects. He studiously ignores any plausible arguments that automation may cause mass unemployment and civil unrest, or that synthetic biology and CRISPR gene editing may create terrifying new artificial life forms and viruses. And he waves aside the idea that AI and body modification may lead to the creation of a new species of uber-humans that will enslave the rest of us.

Rosling could be right, of course, but the jury is still out. What we do know as  fact, however is that terrorism is increasing, more people are dying from war, polar ice caps are melting, and AI is seen by some to pose an even greater danger to the future of humanity than climate change.

At the moment, though, Rosling’s sword metaphor for technology isn’t so much a weapon against falsehoods that seem plausible; it’s more like the sword of Damocles, which hung by a single hair over the throne of Dionysius as a warning of constant peril and foreboding.

If Rosling is right, the “silent miracle of human progress”, as he described it, will continue. If it doesn’t, however, his unbridled optimism looks actively irresponsible. It is not encouraging that earlier this year Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct.

Silicon Valley is famous for its technological innovation. It’s less well known for being at the ideological cutting edge.

Two new technology-based ideologies that have been born in the Valley are transhumanism and posthumanism. It is hard to understand one without the other, and the boundaries between these two, still rather rough, sets of beliefs are very blurred.

Transhumanism has been described by Francis Fukuyama as one of the greatest threats to the idea of human equality and says that transhumanists are “just about the last group I’d like to see live forever”. When I wrote about transhumanism for Wired back in 2014, many people thought I was a lunatic. Then, in the 2016 presidential election Zoltan Istvan ran against Donald Trump as the Transhumanist Party’s candidate, and this year, Mark O’Connell’s book To Be a Machine won the Wellcome Book Prize.

It has been shaped by science-fiction, but the origins of transhumanism can be found as far back as the 1900s, or even earlier to the quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the search for the Fountain of Youth. The first transhumanists formally met at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s and quickly became the centre of transhumanist thinking. It now is a global movement with Italian Giuseppe Vatinno the first elected transhumanist member of parliament.

Today, transhumanists count among their member’s influential figures such as futurist Raymond Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the venture capitalist most people love to hate. Oxford University’s own Professor Nick Bostrom is co-cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association and author of the New York Times best seller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which has been recommended by the likes of Bill Gates.

If you haven’t yet heard, transhumanism is a rather optimistic set of beliefs – a movement to liberate humanity – clustered around the core idea that technology will take us beyond the physical and intellectual limitations of being human. Technologies like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, robotics, AI and digital brain emulation will transform what it means to be human. Transhumanism of a sort is implied in the soft sell for self-driving cars, virtual reality and any kind of AI.

More from this author

The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

Transhumanism, critics argue, has become one of the de facto ideologies of the Silicon Valley establishment in that it justifies the Valley’s culture of ‘move fast, break things and make as much money as possible’ – because ‘hey, what we are doing is liberating humanity’.

What is often left out of this explainer by those who want transhumanism to be taken seriously are the ‘wackier’ elements. The belief that this transformation will occur through the actual physical fusion of technology and humanity by body modification and enhancements. Or the belief that the exponential growth of technology is taking us on a journey far beyond our understanding of what it is to be human today, to a point when, in a literal sense, we become posthuman.

Our posthuman self could be an immortal digital entity able to download its consciousness into a synthetic body of its choice on Earth, or a robot exploring the moons of Jupiter. It could mean that we alter our very biology to enhance our bodies or become a new species of posthuman. Other researchers have wondered if there is the need for an international treaty to save the endangered human.

Transhumanists call the almost mystical moment after which this fusion is possible “The Singularity“.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

Then there is the belief in the inevitability of an AI takeover. This is a set of beliefs often confusingly called posthumanism. Rather than thinking about beyond humanity, this kind of posthumanism is more focused on the elimination of humanity. It is a darker, more extreme and pessimistic alternative to transhumanism. It shares many ideas with transhumanism such as the exponential growth of technology and a belief in The Singularity. But it removes the human agency behind technological change and believes in the inevitability of the creation of a superintelligent AI that replaces us in a very deterministic way.

According to this way of thinking, technology is evolving at an exponential rate driven by the constant need of capitalism to expand and it is inevitable that at some point along this curve the technological singularity will occur. This is the moment when humans create an artificial intelligence that surpasses the intellectual abilities of men and women, even a genius like Stephen Hawking. It is the last machine that humans will ever make.

With this level of intellectual firepower, the machine acquires the ability not only to reproduce itself but also to improve itself. The resulting “Intelligence Explosion” leads to a runaway cycle of self-improving AI that results in a powerful, superintelligent computer that surpasses all human intelligence. Rather than physically fusing with this technology, the human era comes to an end in the Darwinian nightmare of the human race’s replacement by a superior intelligence that we ourselves have created.

At best we should just give a fatalistic shrug of our collective shoulders to our inevitable self-extermination. At worst, it is a suicide pill, since it is our evolutionary duty, believers argue, to create the AI that will replace us. Some posthumanists would even go so far as to argue that it would be a cosmic tragedy if we stopped this from happening.

Cosmists, as their name suggests, are in the ‘suicide pill’ camp. Computer scientist Hugo de Garis argues that humanity must build these “godlike super creatures”, which they call artilects, even if it risks the destruction of the human species. The assumption behind this is that the life of ordinary humans – whom they call Terrans – is worth less than that of artilects.

Cosmists like de Garis have started to argue that the drive to create these new godlike creatures will lead to the first “gigadeath war” – a war that kills billions of people. They believe that the war will start when ordinary humans try to prevent the creation of these superintelligent machines, and that the only way to survive alongside these new creatures is to become cyborgs.

These crazy-sounding beliefs are not, of course, universally accepted by the technology community, and there are different versions of each. There are also transhumanists like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom who are aware of the risks of such a process of technological transformation. Others argue that The Singularity is already happening. What matters is that there are transhumanists and posthumanists in positions to decide where investment goes in the Valley and elsewhere.

Further reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

Biohackers who try to alter their DNA at home or upgrade their own body with a neural interface may make the headline. But Peter Thiel has invested millions into biotechnology start-ups in search of a way to cheat death. Then there is Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others. It is reported to be developing implantable brain-computer cyborg-like interfaces that we see in sci-fi movies. It may even help humanity stay in control of AI.

‘Mind uploading’, otherwise known as whole brain emulation, has attracted millions of dollars of investment from the billionaires of Silicon Valley and beyond. A leading venture capitalist told me that he is not worried about the AI research carried out in public in universities so much as the research that is going on in unregulated private laboratories.

In the end, we need to know what the researchers believe because to a posthuman the things that matter to us today, such as the privacy of our data, the health of our democracy and the survival of our local bookshop can too easily be seen as an outdated – as all too ‘human’ concepts. The question is, do you?

The robot that performed this stunt was the called the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR). It wasn’t a humanoid robot like we’re used to in seeing on screen. Instead, it was a one-arm machine that looked as though it belonged on the factory floor of BMW.

Nor was it completely autonomous. Using a near-infrared camera, the robot followed tiny marks that the researchers had placed on the tissue beforehand. A human was also needed to vacuum away the vapours from burning fat and tissue.

In 2016, the robot performed a similar stunt when it sewed together two segments of pig intestine with stitches that were more regular and leak-resistant than those of experienced surgeons.

For some – the surgeons themselves, perhaps; and those who harbour worrries about robot overlords – it is the stuff of nightmares. But to its creators, it is the future of surgery.

The heroic age of the surgeon, they believe, is coming to an end for the same reasons the age of the pilot and driver did. Robot surgery offers patients more precise and less invasive keyhole surgery than they get from a human with a scalpel, gown and mask. In time, whole new operations may become possible.

More precise surgery means faster operations, quicker recovery times and less chance of secondary infection – of vital importance with an ageing population and the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections. It is predicted that in some countries, 40% of the population may be over 65 by the middle of the century. And deaths from these opportunistic infections could amount to 50 million a year globally by 2050. The robots could save them.

Robotic surgery would also mean busier operating theatres and patients spending less time in hospital beds afterwards. It would make recruitment easier, when the predicted shortage of 100,000 doctors in the USA becomes a reality.

Once humans got over the fear factor, it would also mean fewer mistakes on the operating table. The researchers behind STAR believe that the autonomous features of their robot will develop in a similar way to the autonomous features that are now common on cars. Forward collision avoidance and lane detection were once novel features: now they are standard in the family car.

Likewise, they believe that robots like STAR will slowly take over specific functions from human surgeons until they eventually morph into fully autonomous surgical robots.

Well – that is what the engineers hope. Medicine is a notoriously conservative field. Worries over the safety of the hardware and unforeseen side effects of the surgery have a tendency to reduce innovation to a crawl. This in turn can eliminate competition and drive up prices.

For now, the dominant robot machine on the market is one that was approved 18 years ago, called da Vinci and made by Intuitive Surgical. It is probably better described as a robotic assistant as it is directed by the surgeon.

The surgeon controls the robot’s four arms via a 3D HD screen on a console, allowing her to operate with joysticksand a pedal; computers translate her movements into precisemovements of the robot’s micro-tools, offering greater precision than the human hand. The da Vinci has no autonomous features at all.

Nor are there many of them in existence. For pretty obvious reasons. Each costs an eye-watering $2m to buy and is large enough to fill a standard-sized room – permanently. Furthermore, the yearly maintenance charge can be close to $200,000.  This is the robot for the 1%.

Happily, many of the over 650 patents that protect the technology of the da Vinci have recently expired or are due to expire soon, which should mean that cheaper generic copies will arrive at a hospital near you soon.

These copies won’t be the only new arrivals. We can expect quite a crowd of robotic assistants in the near future, given the size of the potential market that was last year valued at $3,000 million. In six years’ time, it is expected to be worth a whopping $11,000m.

Rushing in is CMR Surgical a British start-up keen to get in on the act. It has launched a robotic assistant called Versius, which has a set of independent, human-looking arms. Unlike the da Vinci, they are light enough to move from theatre to theatre. And they are much cheaper too. The Italian start-up Medical Microinstruments (MMI) has designed a robot intended for reconstructive microsurgery delicate enough to be used on babies. And Auris Health, from its patents, seems to have big ambitions to use to robotics to transform surgery. In all cases, this is man and machine in perfect harmony.

But there is a move to reduce human input behind all this. And, naturally, Google is already in on the act. Johnson & Johnson has teamed up with Google’s life-sciences division, Verily, to form Verb Surgical.Verb is developing a connected digital surgery platform that will incorporate robotics, visualisation, advanced instrumentation and machine learning. STAR’s developers, too, are pushing to make the robot fully autonomous.

It is difficult to imagine medical regulators agreeing to the kind of testing in surgery that has driven experimental self-driving vehicles on to our city streets, yet this would be the necessary step to accelerate the development of such a revolutionary technology.

As prices tumble, more companies enter the market and innovation increases, it’s clear that surgical robots now have the capability to revolutionise surgery for the 99%. But the question remains whether the regulators will let them.