NONFICTION
What’s Wrong With Big Tech? Three Stanford Professors Think They Know.
By Kara
Swisher
Sept. 9,
2021
SYSTEM
ERROR
Where Big
Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
By Rob
Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Stop me if
you’ve heard this one: A philosopher, a computer engineer and a government guy
walk into a bar — and give us a very detailed and overwhelming college lecture
about what we need to do about tech, its power and the damaging unintended
(and, often, quite intended) consequences of its inventions.
It’s a
noble effort, but about halfway through this book by three Stanford professors,
I felt as if maybe I were the one who needed a stiff drink, given the ceaseless
onslaught of studies, factoids and examples of a far too broad swath of the
problems that face our country and the world because of the growing hegemony of
tech companies and their products.
Don’t get
me wrong, it’s critical that we make more connections between tech and the rest
of our world, especially as it invades everything from politics to
entertainment to communications to travel to, yes, how we fall in love. And
it’s important to recognize how we’ve become twisted and angry and hopelessly
addicted, due in part to the flood of malevolent information that flows over
devices and gadgets that we cannot now live without.
That was
the impetus of the authors — Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein —
when they joined together at Stanford to create a multidisciplinary
undergraduate course called “Ethics, Public Policy and Technological Change.”
Its aim, as described by the school, is to “explore the ethical and social
impact of technological innovation, marrying the humanities, social science and
computer science” and from there “to bring about a fundamental shift in how
students, whatever their choice of major and whatever their professional career
pathway, think about their role as enablers and shapers of technological change
in society.”
Well, sign
me up — except that in book form and not over a full semester, it becomes a
laundry list of very weighty issues, each of which should be (and has been) the
subject of its own book. These include, among other things: artificial intelligence,
algorithms, facial recognition, self-driving cars, privacy, hate speech and the
obvious corruption built into the venture system of capitalization. Even
Soylent, the drink invented to minimize the need to prepare food, makes an
appearance.
If that
sounds like reading an action-packed syllabus, it is exactly like that, minus
getting to hang on the lovely Palo Alto campus. Jamming all these topics into
one book gives it a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality about the material,
although for those not familiar, “System Error” certainly serves as a very
well-written, if superficial, primer for all we need to know about the impact
of the tech industry.
Then again,
maybe the authors should be applauded for their impulse to write the book at
all, to the extent that it challenges readers to think beyond a one-note
computer education that’s driven by efficiency and optimization, without
ethical rigor. Big Tech celebrates ad nauseam the ability to grow fast and
scale endlessly rather than asking whether and how we should make some product
in the first place. Understanding consequences and taking responsibility for
their innovation is scarce in the industry, and that is exactly how the problem
mutates to where we are.
The authors
— who are the ones teaching these wunderkinds — do understand that there needs
to be some self-reflection, finding a medium somewhere between tech boosterism
and the techlash. But in playing out the challenges, they provide only one
short chapter about solutions, again like a checklist and far too light to let
readers feel as if they can do much about the Silicon Valley freight train
headed their way. When complex tech phrases like “blitzscaling,” “privacy
paradox,” “OKRs” and “success disaster” whiz by, it’s hard to imagine doing
anything about it but firing up the iPhone and doomscrolling Twitter.
In other
words, I’ll take that Soylentini now.
Kara
Swisher is an opinion writer for The Times and the host of the podcast Sway.
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