A CALL TO ARMS

I’m re-reading an important book about Artificial Intelligence - all the more important since it comes out of the conversations had by 3 individuals teaching a course on the subject - System Error – how big tech went wrong and how we can reboot (2021) by a philospher, a top-level computer scientist and a political adviser/”scientist”. Such a multi-disciplinary authorship gives me more confidence in the book although its emphasis on the importance of values is perhaps an indication of the philosopher’s influence. I had forgotten that I had posted about it a couple of years ago

At 400 pages it could and should be much shorter and fails two of the tests I set some 3 years ago for non-fiction books

• its intro doesn’t summarise each chapter to allow the reader to get a sense of the book’s thrust (some chapter subheadings do give hints)

• it lacks the short guide to further reading which might help the reader understand any author bias

The chapters headings do give some guidance about the book’s argument-

1. The Optimisation Mindset – where tech engineers are set up as the bogeymen

2. the Unholy Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists

3. The Race between Disruption and Democracy

4. Can Algorithmic decisions ever be fair?

5. What’s your Privacy worthwhile?

6. Can Humans flourish in a world of smart machines?

7. Will free speech survive the Internet?

8. Can Democracie rise to the challenge?

Here are some excerpts -

When we uncritically celebrate technology or unthinkingly criticize it, the end result is to leave technologists in charge of our future. This book was written to provide an understanding of how we as individuals, and especially together as citizens in a democracy, can exercise our agency, reinvigorate our democracy, and direct the digital revolution to serve our best interests

We must resist the temptation to think in extremes. Both techno-utopianism and -dystopianism are all too facile and simplistic outlooks for our complex age. Instead of taking the easy way out or throwing our hands up in the air, we must rise to the defining challenge of our era: harnessing technological progress to serve rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies. We can’t leave our technological future to engineers, venture capitalists, and politicians. This book lays out the dangers of leaving the optimizers in charge and empowers all of us to make the difficult decisions that will determine how technology transforms our society.

There are few more important tasks before us in the twenty-first-century. When we act collectively, we not only take charge of our own destiny, we also make it far likelier that our technological future will be one in which individuals will flourish alongside, and because of, a reinvigorated democracy.

Concluding Chapter In the blink of an eye, our relationship with technology changed. We once connected with family and friends on social networks. Now they’re viewed as a place for disinformation and the manipulation of public health and elections. We enjoyed the convenience of online shopping and the unfettered communication that smartphones brought us. Now they’re seen as a means to collect data from us, put local stores out of business, and hijack our attention. We shifted from a wide-eyed optimism about technology’s liberating potential to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. It’s no surprise, then , that trust in technology companies is declining. 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. 

It need not be so. There are many actions we can take as an initial line of defense against the disruptions of big tech in our personal, professional, and civic lives. Perhaps the most important first step is one you’ve already taken by getting to this point in the book, which is to inform yourself about the myriad ways technology impacts your life. To fight for your rights in high-stakes decisions, you need to understand whether an algorithm is involved. In contexts such as being denied a mortgage, losing access to social services, or encountering the criminal justice system, you may have a right to seek more transparency into the processes.

One of my criticisms of “System Error” is that it lacks a short guide on “further reading” for those who wanted to get guidance about key books in the field. This, of course, is not an easy task. It requires authors to put their prejudices aside and try to identify the most important texts – not just contemporary but in the field as a whole. These are my suggestions -

Background Reading on Technology
The Technological Society Jacques Ellul 1964

The Revolution of Hope - toward a humanized technology by Eric Fromm 1968

The Republic of Technology Daniel Boorstin 1978

Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era Zbigniew Brzezinski 1980

The Technological System Jacques Ellul 1980.

The Impact of Science James Burke, Isaac Asimov (NASA 1985)

The Whale and the Reactor – a search for limits in the age of high technology Langdon 

Winner 1986

The Technological Bluff Jacques Ellul 1989

The Second Machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant 

technologies; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014

Interesting that I can find only a couple of critical books in the new millennium!! 

Were previous generations really that more critical??