IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 30

The famed biologist/myrmecologist/prolific author,
Edward O. Wilson, conducted experiments on master/
slave ant species. The particular species of ant Wilson
was studying was not an advanced slave maker. When
their slaves were taken away, the master ants still
retained a latent capacity for work that was reactivated, "rapidly taking over most of the tasks formerly
carried out by the slaves... [This] latent capacity for
working is a capacity that is totally lacking in more
advanced species of slave making ants." But there is
a caveat. "The [master] workers that had lost their
slaves did not, however, perform their tasks well" and,
in fact would have star ved were the slaves not
returned [33].
The takeaway: No, we're not ants, but just as the
slave making ants lost the ability and willingness to do
for themselves, even to the extent of perishing from
hunger, so do we face the increasing prospect of a losing-it-for-not-using-it future.
According to Wilson, "The evolution of social parasitism in ants works like a ratchet, allowing a species
to slip further down in parasitic dependence but not
back up toward its original free-living existence" [33].
Though, in Wilson's view, the master ants are the parasites, in a perverse twist that bears on our master/
slave engagement with technology, as per the subtitle
of Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences,
the ant slaves are taking revenge by rendering their
masters helpless without them. Again, drawing on
Rees' characterization of parasitism, the ant slaves,
thanks to their creating the ratchet of master ant
dependency, parasitically drain the life preserving
vitality of the slave maker. The self-similarity to our
own master/slave engagement with technolog y
appears. On the surface, technology is our slave, we
are its master. We command Alexa. Alexa, coupled to
its virally multiplying "skills," obeys and does our bidding [34]. As with a master/slave ant species, Alexa
becomes the parasite, rendering us more and more
helpless, dependent, vulnerable [35]. Our human
ends, as political theorist, Langdon Winner, observed
in Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out of-Control
as a Theme in Political Thought, are being reverse
adapted "to match the character of the available
means" [36].

Return of the Jewel Wasp
It's time now to revisit Matt Simon's tale of the parasitoid jewel wasp and her doomed zombified dupe,
the larva eviscerating cockroach with far from identical, but nonetheless revealing self-similar parallels to
our own ongoing affairs with the techno-juggernaut.
The vital difference between the wasp's zombifying

designs on her larva-nurturing-at-its-expense victim is
that mirroring the rise of entropy in the universe
itself, the degrading of human order is not uniform.
Technology is indeed a double-edged sword. It really
does, symbiotically, do things for us, freeing us up to
do and be and create what we could not do and be
and create otherwise. But as with today's soaring
wealth inequality, technology's symbiotic gains concentrate in the elite sliver of humanity who are rising
with the returns of advancing technology, perching
themselves on the high end of the benefit-to-harm
distribution because they allow the technical order to
purposefully translate empowering effort while the
multitudes just let Alexa do the work. The result is
that technology's accelerating returns are increasingly
going to the already rich, creating ever escalating
cumulative advantage known as "The Matthew Effect"
[37].4 The rich are getting richer across the board of
power, access, grasp, skill, income, and net worth at
the increasing expense of the vast bulk of humanity
who only think that their smartphone, always at and
in hand, is doing it all for them.
The successfully evolved jewel wasp has found the
means of insuring the survival and propagation of its
species. Its technique turns the roach into an agent of
its propagation at the roach's expense, thus fulfilling
the definition of a parasite. It paralyzes its victim's front
legs. It taps into just the right spots in the roach's brain
to release dopamine that turns its zombified dupe into
a drowsy, not-a-care-in-the-world grooming machine,
while sweeping aside its instinct for self-preservation as
an added bonus. Advancing technology represents the
concentrating of order that grants its possessor power.
That order, that power, is negentropic, shrinking entropy. But since the Second Law won't allow the sum-total
of entropy in the universe to diminish, something -
some environment of the powering up systems of technical advance - must pay the dissipative price. My
claim is that it is us - just not (for now) all of us.

Will it be AI or IA?
In the goldilocks conditions of the Earth, our home,
with resonant solar-energy-driven matter self-organized
into life as a more efficient means for the Second Law to
maximize entropy, the measure of waste heat - of
spread out rendered useless energy - eviscerated possibility. Thanks to our remarkably self-evolved brains,
we huma ns, not necessa r ily as individuals, but as a
species, represent the supreme culmination of the 4.5
billion year evolution of efficiency in entropy production.

4
The frenzied horde of cameras that descended on Tom Brady after the New
England Patriots' Super Bowl LIII slim victory over the Los Angeles Rams is a
visual of the Matthew Effect in action.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER 2019

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019

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