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For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Cal Newport is filling in for Kyle Chayka.
In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fast-paced plot: a group of scientists gather in an ultra-secret underground laboratory to study a deadly extraterrestrial organism, brought to Earth on a crashed space probe. Crichton later revealed that he had been inspired by a biology-textbook footnote about the possibility of organisms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. He had struggled with the manuscript for years—“every draft was awful”—but finally found inspiration from NASA. “When I finally learned that a complicated quarantine procedure really existed for the U.S. moon program,” he said in a 1969 interview, “it was a considerable psychological boost, and then I knew I could do the book.”
“The Andromeda Strain” had a strong premise, but Gottlieb, who would later become the editor of The New Yorker, thought it needed work. As he recalled in a joint 1994 interview, he told Crichton that if the young author agreed to “completely rewrite it” he would publish the book. “Somehow, it occurred to me that instead of trying to flesh out the characters further and make the novel more conventional,” Gottlieb said, “we ought to strip that stuff out completely and make it a documentary, a fictional one.” He suggested that Crichton treat the book like a magazine article, reporting on the events as if they actually happened instead of developing each character’s subjective world. “The author of a nonfiction account would not have the access to the characters’ innermost thoughts in the way you assume for fiction,” Crichton said. “So I began to take all that stuff out and make the book colder and more impersonal.”
The changes worked. The Detroit Free Press said that the thriller featured “hideously plausible suspense,” and Life called it “chillingly effective.” The book hit the New York Times best-seller list and caught the attention of Universal Pictures, which paid Crichton a quarter-million dollars (more than two million in today’s dollars) for the movie rights. Crichton ended his medical training early and became a writer and director in California. Gottlieb’s advice, which helped launch Crichton’s career, remains surprisingly relevant today. The story of a new technology needs no hero or villain to drive the action forward; the technology itself often becomes the protagonist, and we all live with the consequences.
Lately, we seem to have forgotten Gottlieb’s lesson. Big tech platforms like Meta (formerly Facebook) and X (formerly Twitter), for example, have commodified our attention, polarized our politics, and undermined our collective understanding of the truth. But in responding to these dangers we seem to focus most on the people involved, such as Elon Musk, the owner of X, when he makes a distinctly Nazi-esque gesture at Donald Trump’s Inauguration rally, or Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, because of his new “masculine energy”—expressed in his penchant for gold chains, jujitsu, and bow hunting.
Public figures should, of course, be held accountable for their actions. But when we make these techno-dramas all about the characters, we mislead ourselves into thinking that we have problems with technology only because of problematic people. In fact, as Crichton learned, technologies often wriggle out of the grasp of their creators. During the long decline of Twitter, many social-media users wondered where they ought to go; would Threads, Bluesky, or some unimagined platform redeem social media and become a new center of online conversation? A better question—the question in Crichton’s best books—is whether we really want such technologies in our lives at all.
In a New York Times review of Crichton’s most famous book, “Jurassic Park,” the literary critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt notes that at first its dinosaur plot “sounds like just another recycling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein myth.” In “Frankenstein,” the eponymous scientist reanimates a corpse, which then escapes and runs amok. In “Jurassic Park,” scientists bring dinosaurs back to life; they too escape and run amok. But Crichton’s book, Lehmann-Haupt argues, has a unique feature that makes it a “superior specimen of the myth.”
Shelley seemed most interested in crafting a tragic human narrative. Dr. Frankenstein is isolated from society by his ambition; in a lonely mania, he makes a choice that ultimately sows destruction. Although the novel could be described as science fiction, the science isn’t meant to be recognizable. “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” her narrator recalls. A few moments later, the monster opens an eye. In time, after pursuing the monster that he has made to the Arctic, Dr. Frankenstein proclaims, “Seek happiness and tranquility, and avoid ambition.” He seems to be warning about the dangers of solitary scheming, not the dangers of technology.
“Jurassic Park,” in contrast, follows Gottlieb’s dictum to deëmphasize individual characters. “By telling his island adventure from many points of view,” Lehmann-Haupt writes, “he cleverly undermines the reader’s belief that the story has a hero.” The real protagonist is the technology of de-extinction; the reader is exhilarated by its possibilities and terrified of its consequences. Whereas Shelley obfuscates how Dr. Frankenstein re-creates life, Crichton cares about the scientific details; on a guided tour, we learn how DNA is isolated from preserved prehistoric mosquitoes, and even hear about the shortcomings of the Loy antibody-extraction technique. (“Most soluble protein is leached out during fossilization, but twenty percent of the proteins are still recoverable,” a helpfully expository scientist informs us.) Crichton goes on to re-create the display of a Cray X-MP supercomputer, which identifies a DNA error that will be repaired with restriction enzymes.
“Jurassic Park,” like many dramas about technology, features a rich man with strange ambitions: John Hammond, the wealthy founder of a Silicon Valley genetics company called InGen. Yet Hammond isn’t presented as an evil figure who casts a shadow over the book; he is a jovial grandfather obsessed with creating the ultimate spectacle. He is too naïve to see the risks inherent in toying with nature, but it is difficult to imagine him declaring, “Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition!” Although Crichton ultimately has him devoured by a pack of venomous procompsognathus, we don’t really care about his interiority. We’re too busy following the exterior reality of how his creations thwart the park’s security systems.
These days, when confronting new tools that concern us, we seem to be taking our cues more from Shelley than Crichton. News coverage of Musk often focusses on his provocative statements and chaotic personality. The technology journalist Kara Swisher recently wrote on Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, that Zuckerberg is “a small little creature with a shrivelled soul.” Crichton, if he were alive, might focus more on the personality of the platforms themselves. Twitter was once conceived as a digital town square—a place where people from around the world could share a common conversation, free from media gatekeeping and government censorship. But uniting hundreds of millions of users into a limited number of common conversations required a computationally intensive curation to surface the most relevant and attention-grabbing interactions. As I’ve reported, this technical challenge is inevitably biased toward generating rancor, strife, and misinformation; these are the properties that will always thrive in an environment of algorithmic amplification. The problems with Twitter, and now X, are not just about how its weird owner runs the place. They’re intrinsic to the underlying technology.
Sometimes a Shelleyesque approach leads us to blame entire classes of individuals for the harms caused by a tool. Consider the case of e-mail, which has evolved over the past two decades to become a source of stressful distraction and overload. An obvious response is to blame faceless managers for exploiting the productive potential of employees. If only we had better bosses, the argument goes, capitalism would be more humane and we’d have better work-life balance. (This argument isn’t always wrong, of course.) Such complaints naturally lead to regulations that constrain individual behavior, as when French legislators attempted to stop managers from sending e-mails outside work hours. As I learned while researching a book about e-mail, however, many of the medium’s consequences are fundamental to its easy-to-use design. The simple act of introducing an ultra-low-friction form of messaging disrupted the fragile ecosystems of modern office work. When you make it easier to communicate, people automatically begin communicating a lot more.
Many of Crichton’s books do away with their techno-threats in spectacular ways. The lab in “The Andromeda Strain” is equipped with a nuclear device to incinerate any organism that proves impossible to control. At the end of “Jurassic Park,” the Costa Rican military napalms Isla Nublar, the island on which Hammond had built his park. Since this is not going to happen in Silicon Valley, we need a way to capture the spirit of these plot devices in the real world. Two simple questions will do. Is this technology working for us? If not, what if we metaphorically blew it up?
Once we give up on finding the perfect owners for social-media platforms, for example, we might begin the systematic work of removing them from our lives—whether by banning them for children or simply abandoning them en masse. I’ve long argued that the solution to endless e-mails is not to tell people to send fewer messages but to instead change the rules of work to curtail unnecessary back-and-forth chatter. We might, say, adopt the academic concept of office hours to replace drawn-out e-mail threads with short, in-person conversations. A.I. provides another useful case study. It’s tempting to gossip about the ongoing feud between Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, and Musk, or to be creeped out by the conspicuous, kleptocratic presence of tech business leaders during Donald Trump’s Inauguration ceremonies. But here, in a way that seems more immediately obvious than with social media or e-mail, the true problem is the technology and the many unpredictable harms that it could cause. Our current moment is made scarier by the degree to which it resembles the early chapters of a Crichton thriller. The John Hammonds of the A.I. industry have been popping the champagne in self-congratulation, and we have no shortage of beleaguered characters who are questioning whether building a metaphorical dinosaur theme park is such a good idea: computer scientists who warn of existential risks, workers who worry about being replaced, environmentalists who denounce the A.I. models’ voracious appetite for water and fossil-fuel-powered electricity.
In Crichton’s novels, no one ever intervenes before disaster strikes—that would sap the energy from the plot. But real life poses a wider range of possibilities. If we are worried that ever larger and ever more powerful models will unleash dangerous capabilities that we cannot control, then regulations and incentives could push the field toward smaller, more bespoke models that are meant to handle specific tasks. (The success of China’s DeepSeek model, whose début caused U.S. tech stocks to crash this week, is due in part to its coördinated use of compact, cheaply trained sub-models that target different domains.) I don’t need a chatbot that does everything to make my life easier; perhaps a mini-model on my phone, which can manage my calendar and my text messages, might solve the problems I actually have. Maybe the staff of Jurassic Park could have deployed their gene technologies on vaccines and cancer treatments, instead of cloning dinosaurs.
“The Andromeda Strain” came out in 1969, a year of fervent excitement about NASA’s impending missions to the moon. The book’s epilogue imagines a world in which similar missions don’t go so well; a fictional NASA spokesperson describes the mysterious loss of a crewed space capsule. The reader understands that the Andromeda strain probably killed the astronauts, but the spokesperson elides these details, saying, “We regard the failure . . . as a scientific error, a breakdown in systems technology, not as a specifically human error.” As such, the spokesperson says, crewed space missions are being put on hold. We should always be willing to set aside our dreams of a brighter technological future, the book seems to suggest. Otherwise, they may turn out to be nightmares. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
