System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
- Length: 352 pages
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
- Publisher: Harper
- Publication Date: 2021-09-07
- ISBN-10: 006306488X
- ISBN-13: 9780063064881
- Sales Rank: #21291 (See Top 100 Books)
A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors—experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades—which reveals how big tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves.
In no more than the blink of an eye, a naïve optimism about technology’s liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the politicians who give them free rein.
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 professors—a 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.
Cover Title Page Dedication Contents Preface Introduction Part I: Decoding the Technologists Chapter 1: The Imperfections of the Optimization Mindset Should We Optimize Everything? The Education of an Engineer The Deficiency of Efficiency What Is Measurable Is Not Always Meaningful What Happens When Multiple Valuable Goals Collide? Chapter 2: The Problematic Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists The Engineers Take the Reins The Ecosystem of Venture Capitalists and Engineers The Optimization Mindset Meets Corporate Growth Hunting for Unicorns The New Generation of Venture Capitalists Technology Companies Turn Market Power into Political Power Chapter 3: The Winner-Take-All Race Between Disruption and Democracy Innovation Versus Regulation Is Nothing New Government Is Complicit in the Absence of Regulation The Fate of Plato’s Philosopher Kings What’s Good for Companies May Not Be Good for a Healthy Society Democracy as a Guardrail Part II: Disaggregating the Technologies Chapter 4: Can Algorithmic Decision-Making Ever Be Fair? Welcome to the Age of Machines That Learn Designing Fair Algorithms Algorithms on Trial A New Era of Algorithmic Accountability The Human Element in Algorithmic Decisions How to Govern Algorithms Opening the “Black Box” Chapter 5: What’s Your Privacy Worth? The Wild West of Data Collection A Digital Panopticon? From the Panopticon to a Digital Blackout Technology Alone Won’t Save Us We Can’t Count on the Market, Either A Privacy Paradox Protecting Privacy for the Benefit of Society Four Letters That Are Key to Your Privacy Beyond GDPR Chapter 6: Can Humans Flourish in a World of Smart Machines? Beware the Bogeyman What Is So Smart About Smart Machines? Is Automation Good for the Human Race? Plugging into the Experience Machine The Great Escape from Human Poverty What Is Freedom Worth to You? The Costs of Adjustment Should Anything Be Beyond the Reach of Automation? Where Do Humans Fit In? What Can We Offer Those Who Are Left Behind? Chapter 7: Will Free Speech Survive the Internet? The Superabundance of Speech and Its Consequences When Free Speech Collides with Democracy and Dignity What Are the Offline Harms of Online Speech? Can AI Moderate Content? A Supreme Court for Facebook? Moving Beyond Self-Regulation The Future of Platform Immunity Creating Space for Competition Part III: Recoding the Future Chapter 8: Can Democracies Rise to the Challenge? So What Can I Do? It’s Not Just You, It’s Us Rebooting the System Technologists, Do No Harm New Forms of Resistance to Corporate Power Governing Technology Before It Governs Us Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher
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