In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These four are among the questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following? Today’s post is about, you guessed it, followers. More precisely, it’s about who followers, ordinary people, can trust.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Who Do You Trust?” was the title of a popular television game show. For five years it was emceed by Johnny Carson who went on, of course, to become the GOAT of late-night television hosts. But then his role was to get contestants to decide if they trusted themselves correctly to answer a question – or thought it better to trust someone else. Who did they think was more likely to get the right answer?
Though the show is from another era, the question it asks is more urgent than ever. It is key not just to how we function as individuals but as a collective. Who do we trust? Who do we trust personally, professionally, politically – and technologically?
In the old days, when “Who Do You Trust?” aired, Americans were generally a trustworthy people. Specifically, into the mid-1960s we trusted people in positions of authority. But our trust specifically in government, in our political leaders, began to wane first after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. And second, after the military and political mendaciousness that was associated with the war in Vietnam. Since then, the trend has never reversed. And since then, mistrust has spread.
In his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols argued that mistrust had become endemic.* Moreover, its demise implied not just a rejection of existing knowledge, but of science, of objective reality generally. It was emblematic of an age, Nichols wrote, in which “all citizens [all followers] believe themselves to be experts on everything.”**
The years of covid – which were characterized as much by ignorance as fear and loathing – further accelerated and exacerbated the existing trend. Many Americans were more ready to believe what the president of the United States said than medical and scientific experts. It didn’t help that President Donald Trump appeared convinced of his every word while the experts seemed to be fumbling in the dark – which often, for good reason, they were. To this day Trump continues to sell himself as a medical expert. Just this week he issued an executive order on measles vaccines for children that, to quote the Wall Street Journal, “isn’t based on rigorous science, or really any science at all.”
Which brings us – as all roads seem now to do – to AI. As the pace of its development accelerates, experts and laypeople alike are becoming perceptibly uneasy. Uneasy not just about the rapidity and extremity of the changes taking place – five years or less before AI is smarter than we are? – but about who exactly is in charge. Who in matters of artificial intelligence is leading and who following? It’s fine to argue that “humans cannot be passengers” in the AI car.*** And it’s fine to charge that companies are making critical AI decisions without any kind of social or political mandate. But how exactly are followers, we, supposed to weigh in? How exactly do we “acquire more agency over our human future”?
Who do we trust? Do we trust us?
——————————————————
*The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press).
** Nichols’s argument was presaged by my own. In The End of Leadership (HarperCollins, 2012).I point out that because of changing cultures and technologies leaders (experts, authority figures) in Western democracies were getting weaker while followers (ordinary people) were getting stronger.
*** John Thornhill in the Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/33094bff-546e-4ac2-a949-af2e9daaa3f0?syn-25a6b1a6=1