Destiny is an illusion.
The future isn't written yet.
The world according to Amol Rajan.
Tech, climate, demography: journalist Amol Rajan discusses the giant forces reshaping our world; immediacy versus deep global trends; and the importance of allowing ourselves the space to rethink the status quo and route-map the future.
PEOPLE
BBC broadcaster-of-the-moment Amol Rajan is a big fan of people who actively engage with the future, rather than just talking about it. He spends a lot of time with people who talk about it. “And, dare I say it,” he adds, “we in the news industry are often talking about the wrong things.”
This informs two simple yet strong principles that have guided Rajan’s own journalistic approach, especially in recent years.
“I really believe we should try to shift the balance in our news culture, in terms of what we focus on, from events to trends,” he explains. “It’s very hard to do, because the impulse of journalists is towards the thrill and the immediacy of the most recent thing. That’s why news is called news; we thirst for the new things. If a war erupts; a minister resigns; a monarch dies; a champion is crowned, it allows us to paste the word ‘breaking’ in capital letters across our screens and tweets. All the impulses of social media – the tyranny of those algorithms – are toward the instant, the immediate, the ephemeral, rather than the lasting, the slow or the deep.”
And yet, he just can’t budge the feeling that, a lot of the time, the big story – the real story – is in the numbers. “It’s hidden in the deep global trends that are humanity’s course slowly unfolding: astonishing gains in longevity and maternal health, changes in demography, reductions in child mortality, amazing advances in technology, collapses in the populations of a particular species or ecosystems. That, to me, is news. It doesn’t feel as new but, in many ways, it is much more urgent.”
The other deep belief Rajan has about where his industry mostly goes wrong is closely related. “It’s the profound feeling that we are living through a kind of epoch shift, a kind of hinge moment in history where everything changes, where change is the only constant, and everything is up for grabs. The old order is crumbling, and the new one is yet to be born.” As such, much of Rajan’s recent work has been geared around discussing those trends set to dramatically shape societal structures and settings in years to come, and gleaning insight from those actively attempting to navigate this nascent future.
We are living through a kind of epoch shift, a hinge moment in history where everything changes, where change is the only constant, and everything is up for grabs. The old order is crumbling, and the new one is yet to be born.
Roadmaps to tomorrow
During the pandemic, while working as the BBC’s first media editor, Rajan launched a podcast on Radio 4, entitled Rethink, which saw leading minds from across the world offer up their ideas for a better tomorrow. He argued then that Covid-19 marked the end of the American Century – the post-1945 world order defined by American leadership of a rules-based system upheld by key global institutions and converging (with a few notable exceptions) toward liberalism, democracy, and open markets. “But then President Trump came along and reversed much of that with his America-first doctrine,” says Rajan. “You could say that the four years that followed Trump’s initial election, and with Brexit, were a kind of democratic correction or readjustment rather than reversal, because it is true that some of the effects have faded. Trump is running again, but President Biden is in charge for now.
“Here in Britain,” Rajan contends, “local election results showed the Brexit effect in our politics is fading. Jeremy Corbyn has been replaced by the more centrist Sir Kier Starmer, Boris Johnson by Rishi Sunak. Yet we appear, in some senses, to be going back to a late 19th-century world in which great powers spread their influence around them through concentric circles of diminishing influence.
We appear to be going back to a late 19th-century world in which great powers spread their influence around them through concentric circles of diminishing influence.
“It’s where those circles of influence between great powers clash that you get conflict, he submits. “Ukraine is the clash between a Russian and Western concentric circle of influence. Taiwan could be the next. Underneath the surface, upheaval remains because the giant forces wrenching us out of one era and into another don’t just endure, they’re accelerating.”
He refers to global heating and environmental destruction as well as Easternisation, AKA the growing wealth of Asian nations challenging US supremacy and transforming the international balance of power – quite possibly the defining trend of our age. “Economic and political power is shifting East and driven, in part, by sheer weight of numbers. Demography is not destiny, but it does feed it. Any minute now, perhaps already, India will become the world’s most populous country, ahead of China. “It was the late, great Hans Rosling that said that if the world has a PIN code, it should be 1114: one billion people in Europe, one billion in the Americas, one billion in Africa, and four billion in Asia. The secret engine of global history is the youth bulge, but today the West is old in two ways: both the idea of the modern West (born out of the fog of war in 1945), and its rapidly ageing populations.”
Rajan recalls business magnate Elon Musk, and Jack Ma of multinational technology conglomerate Alibaba, remarking that – aside from AI – the collapse in populations (driven by a fast-falling birth-rate right across much of the developed world) would be the biggest threat to civilisation, putting us on a new Road to Serfdom: “not too many people, but too few.”
Key to tracking the shifts and trends remodelling our global landscapes is the final giant force completing the set: tech and data. But its potential extends way beyond the remit of administrative assistance. “Technological change and innovation always speed up history,” says Rajan. “Look at the impact – more than 500 years ago now – of the Gutenberg Press, which radically sped up the dissemination of ideas and content and prompted multiple revolutions: intellectual, scientific and political.”
The future is happening here and it’s happening not to us, but with us and from us, as long as we give ourselves the space and the time to think.
The difference this time is, of course, scale and speed. What happened in 10 days in the age of Gutenberg happens in under 10 seconds in the age of Zuckerberg.
The difference this time is, of course, scale and speed. “What happened in 10 days in the age of Gutenberg happens in under 10 seconds in the age of Zuckerberg. And that’s just based on today’s computing. In fact, yesterday’s computing. Today, the speeding up of history is, itself, speeding up. We are living amid exhilarating technological revolutions which could transform our species. Artificial intelligence is one, quantum computing is the other, and not for nothing has the former been called our final invention.”
Amid all the excitement and anxiety about Chat GPT and similar tools, Rajan feels that two key points have been missed. For one, the large language models – of which Chat GPT is just one type – are not even the most sophisticated AI that’s been built. “Far from it,” he says. “There is, according to those doing the building and engineering, a significant chance that we will reach artificial general intelligence, sometimes called ‘godlike AI’, within a decade.”
And there’s just one other thing. The future isn’t written yet. “I believe destiny is an illusion, and what we do with AI – and, indeed, with those other giant forces reshaping history – is up to us. We should be positive about our own capacities and potential to shape the years to come, rather than be fatalistic or dystopian. AI has astonishing potential, just as quantum computing does, to reduce human suffering, to keep our planet habitable, and to add to what makes life meaningful, which is love – but only if we design the future.
“The future is not something that we passively receive. It’s not something that’s happening ‘over there’ – Beijing or Brussels or Silicon Valley. The future is happening here and it’s happening not to us, but with us and from us, as long as we give ourselves the space and the time to think.”
Quickfire questions.
Amol Rajan on...
His new hosting gig, University Challenge “It’s the best possible antidote to cynicism about young people, allowing millions of us to test our wits against the best minds of a new generation...” The internet (or ‘splinternet’) “Today there is no such thing as the internet. There are internets – plural – with different, indeed rival, systems erupting in many places, but two dominant kingdoms: an American (OK, Californian) internet, and a Chinese one. The latter, being the product of the Communist Party, has a plan to win the future. The former, being a collection of disparate and competing companies, does not.” The next great technological revolution “…will probably be something that’s been talked of for years: the Internet of Things. This basically just means loads of connected devices, all in effect talking to each other. So, your mobile telling your car you didn’t sleep much last night and prompting it to ask if you’re too tired to drive. And so on.” His least favourite words “My two least favourite words in English, after ‘cancer’ and ‘malignant’, are ‘Shakespearean’ and ‘Orwellian’. These ludicrously imprecise terms always exhibit lazy thinking.” Successful rhetoric “If you want people to understand something, mono-syllabic words are usually your best bet… Plain English has power.”