Get Ready Man
“Get Ready! Get Ready! The World is Coming to an End!”
— The Get Ready Man
The Get Ready Man was an old gentleman with bewitched eyes who rattled around the streets of Columbus, Ohio in a Red Devil automobile at the turn of the twentieth century. He would disrupt the city at incongruous moments shouting, “Get ready! The world is coming to an end!” His prediction had few believers. But the Get Ready Man compensated with booming volume, rectitude, and passion. James Thurber dubbed him the Get Ready Man in Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times.
To date, the Get Ready Man has, apparently, been wrong. However, he was engaged in a fundamental human endeavor — predicting the future. We all make predictions in our haphazard ways, even if we don’t reach the prophetic fervor of the Get Ready Man. Predictions about our future as a society are essential, though they are rampant, diverse, and conflicting. We turn to politics to select the most likely predictions: will Obamacare save lives or ruin our medical system? Will stimulus funding rescue the economy or bankrupt future generations?
We adopt policy based on how we predict the future. Therefore, we need reasonable predictions about technology and how that technology will change our lives. Sadly, like the Get Ready Man, only the loudest voices are heard today. A good example is self-driving cars.
In October 2016, Elon Musk announced that in 2017 a self-driving Tesla car will drive from "a home in L.A. to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging.”
It never happened.
Brilliantly, the world’s car manufacturers claimed to know the future in 2017. They predicted the dawn of a new era of autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars:
General Motors expected to have thousands of self-driving electric cars in 2018.
Ford Motors planned to market “a Level 4 vehicle in 2021, no gas pedal, no steering wheel, and the passenger will never need to take control of the vehicle in a predefined area.”
Hyundai announced a $1.7 billion investment in its self-driving car development: “We are targeting for the highway in 2020 and urban driving in 2030.”
BMW anticipated “highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.”
Daimler predicted large-scale commercial production of self-driving cars some time between 2020 and 2025.
Fiat Chrysler said that self-driving cars would be on the public roads by 2021.
Carlos Ghosn, then CEO of Renault-Nissan, now fugitive from Japanese justice, said in 2016:
“This is the first brick — [self-driving cars on a] one-lane highway. Then you’re going to have multi-lane highways, and then you’re going to have urban driving. All of these steps are going to come before 2020.”
Not one of these predictions came true. How can the purported greatest minds of the automobile industry be so wrong?
But it’s not the automobile industry alone. Technology — particularly artificial intelligence — seems to churn with breathless promises. Soon we will have flying cars, robots everywhere, and artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence.
In 1958, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell said, "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion." The digital computer had to wait almost 40 years — 1997 — to defeat a human world chess champion.
Marvin Minsky said in 1961, "within our lifetime machines may surpass us in general intelligence.” In 1967 he doubled down on his prediction: "within a generation, I am convinced, few compartments of intellect will remain outside the machine's realm — the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will be substantially solved."
The optimism of scientists like Simon, Newell, and Minsky seems born more from unbridled enthusiasm than malevolence. However, some predictions are manipulative.
For example, Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, began in 2016 to develop a brain implant that would read and direct brain activity. In 2019, Musk said the implants would begin human trials at the end of 2020. In August 2020, Musk introduced Gertrude the pig whose brain implant was sending signals to a computer screen. Musk claimed that the Neuralink brain implant allowed a monkey to control video games with his mind. Calling it “a Fitbit for your skull,” Musk speculated that the brain implants would cure paralysis and give telepathic powers. He even discussed pricing for human implants in August 2020 — because, as he claimed in 2019 and again in 2020, human trials would begin at the end of 2020.
Human trials of the brain implant have not begun. Now, Neuralink is promising human trials at the end of 2021.
The Get Ready Man may have been harmless, but misleading technology predictions are anything but harmless. When the economic powers of the automobile industry invest in self-driving cars, we are all in for the ride. A 2018 Gallup Poll showed that 75% of Americans would drive their own car even if self-driving cars were commonly available, 52% said they would never ride in a driverless car.
So, the largest automobile companies in the world are investing billions to develop a product that 75% of Americans don’t want. But the glowing predictions of 2016 make the arrival of widespread self-driving cars appear inevitable. The predictions feed common wisdom: the question is not if, but when.
Technological advancement may be inevitable, but it is not inevitably good for all of us. We need to ask how we will be affected, who will control the predicted advances, and at what cost to us. Instead of obsessing about predictions of technological progress, let’s focus on predictions for social progress.
Elon Musk may predict colonies of humans on Mars, investing his wealth in space technology to transport colonists. Why can’t he — and the other multi-billionaires — invest in people on earth? Why can’t he — and we — dream of food, decent housing, and education for all?
These are the dreams of idealism, right? We couldn’t possibly embrace those as realistic predictions, could we? But how realistic is a colony on Mars?
The strange, unsupported myths that the answers to human problems lie way out in space, or on a planet of red rock, dust, and solar winds are absurd. Finding food for all may not be any more realistic than hopscotching the universe. However, if we find food for all, we know that we are all beneficiaries. With Musk’s dreams, only he and a small cadre are the beneficiaries.
You can predict artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, but where are the predictions for what our lives will become? If artificial intelligence takes over our jobs, what will we do? How will we earn the dignity that comes with meeting responsibility?
These predictions are far more complex, they are of human complexity. Let’s work to understand what our lives will be like, not what technology may be capable of.
Somewhere in the universe, the Get Ready Man is still shouting. Get ready is right. But he never said how we should get ready. We should get ready by asking not what machines can do, but what we can do to take care of ourselves and our planet.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.