System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
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Overview
It doesn’t need to be this way.
System Error exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech’s relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. This optimization mindset substitutes what companies care about for the values that we as a democratic society might choose to prioritize. Well-intentioned optimizers fail to measure all that is meaningful and, when their creative disruptions achieve great scale, they impose their values upon the rest of us.
Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professorsa philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, a political scientist who served under Obama, and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also an early Google engineer)reveal how we can hold that power to account.
Troubled by the values that permeate the university’s student body and its culture, they worked together to chart a new path forward, creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow’s technologists approach their profession. Now, as the dominance of big tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9798200741625 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
Publication date: | 09/07/2021 |
Sales rank: | 1,148,047 |
Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
MEHRAN SAHAMI was recruited to Google in its start-up days by Sergey Brin and was one of the inventors of email spam-filtering technology. With a background in machine learning and artificial intelligence, he returned to Stanford as a computer science professor in 2007 and helped redesign the undergraduate computer science curriculum. He is one of the instructors of Stanford’s massive introductory computer programming course taken by nearly 1,500 students per year. Mehran is also a limited partner in several VC funds and serves as an adviser to high-tech start-ups.
JEREMY M. WEINSTEIN went to Washington with President Obama in 2009. A key staffer in the White House, he foresaw how new technologies might remake the relationship between governments and citizens, and launched Obama’s Open Government Partnership. When Samantha Power was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, she brought Jeremy to New York, first as her chief of staff and then as her deputy. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as a professor of political science, where he now leads Stanford Impact Labs.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Introduction xvii
Part I Decoding the Technologists
Chapter 1 The Imperfections of the Optimization Mindset 3
Should We Optimize Everything? 6
The Education of an Engineer 10
The Deficiency of Efficiency 15
What Is Measurable Is Not Always Meaningful 18
What Happens When Multiple Valuable Goals Collide? 19
Chapter 2 The Problematic Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists 25
The Engineers Take the Reins 28
The Ecosystem of Venture Capitalists and Engineers 31
The Optimization Mindset Meets Corporate Growth 33
Hunting for Unicorns 37
The New Generation of Venture Capitalists 42
Technology Companies Turn Market Power into Political Power 45
Chapter 3 The Winner-Take-All Race Between Disruption and Democracy 51
Innovation Versus Regulation Is Nothing New 53
Government Is Complicit in the Absence of Regulation 59
The Fate of Plato's Philosopher Kings 63
What's Good for Companies May Not Be Good for a Healthy Society 68
Democracy as a Guardrail 73
Part II Disaggregating the Technologies
Chapter 4 Can Algorithmic Decision-Making Ever Be Fair? 79
Welcome to the Age of Machines That Learn 82
Designing Fair Algorithms 87
Algorithms on Trial 94
A New Era of Algorithmic Accountability 99
The Human Element in Algorithmic Decisions 101
How to Govern Algorithms 103
Opening the "Black Box" 107
Chapter 5 What's Your Privacy Worth? 111
The Wild West of Data Collection 115
A Digital Panopticon? 120
From the Panopticon to a Digital Blackout 127
Technology Alone Won't Save Us 129
We Can't Count on the Market, Either 133
A Privacy Paradox 137
Protecting Privacy for the Benefit of Society 140
Four Letters That Are Key to Your Privacy 142
Beyond GDPR 145
Chapter 6 Can Humans Flourish in a World of Smart Machines? 153
Beware the Bogeyman 156
What Is So Smart About Smart Machines? 160
Is Automation Good for the Human Race? 165
Plugging into the Experience Machine 167
The Great Escape from Human Poverty 170
What Is Freedom Worth to You? 172
The Costs of Adjustment 174
Should Anything Be Beyond the Reach of Automation? 177
Where Do Humans Fit In? 178
What Can We Offer Those Who Are Left Behind? 182
Chapter 7 Will Free Speech Survive the Internet? 187
The Superabundance of Speech and Its Consequences 191
When Free Speech Collides with Democracy and Dignity 198
What Are the Offline Harms of Online Speech? 202
Can AI Moderate Content? 209
A Supreme Court for Facebook? 213
Moving Beyond Self-Regulation. 216
The Future of Platform Immunity 221
Creating Space for Competition 227
Part III Recoding the Future
Chapter 8 Can Democracies Rise to the Challenge? 233
So What Can I Do? 237
It's Not Just You, It's Us 239
Rebooting the System 243
Technologists, Do No Harm 244
New Forms of Resistance to Corporate Power 252
Governing Technology Before It Governs Us 257
Acknowledgments 265
Notes 269
Index 305