Plough Quarterly • Winter 2018 3 The Joys of Tech Asceticism On Staying Human P E T E R M O M M S E N Dear Reader, E lon Musk, the man who started four billion-dollar tech companies, is worried that computers are on course to kill us. As he told an audience at MIT in 2014, “With artificial intelligence, we are sum- moning the demon.” In his nightmare, a future superintelligent machine will outwit and then eliminate humankind. Accordingly, Musk is working on plans to colonize other planets in case we, or the artificial minds we create, make human survival on Earth impossible. Is Musk paranoid? Inconveniently for his detractors, he’s no agrarian crank, and his concern about artificial intelligence (AI) is shared by people as diverse as Henry Kissinger, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates. According to their line of thinking, AI may soon rank among the threats to humanity’s survival alongside nuclear war and biological terrorism. These anxieties exemplify a wider shift. For a generation, a utopian glow has hung around Silicon Valley and all its works. Now that glow is fading fast. Critics on both the political left and right assail the monopolistic power wielded by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. From Washington to Brussels, Big Tech’s gospel of libertarian capitalism twinned with libertarian morality has worn out its welcome. Once upon a time, Mark Zucker- berg’s motto of “move fast and break things” sounded innocently boyish; now it seems to sum up all too well the menace of machines to humans. Already, robots are replacing workers at an alarming rate. Stung by the backlash, technophiles point to technology’s achievements: What about E di tor’s L et t e r Rachel Newling, Waiting for Fish, linocut Image used by permission of Rachel Newling