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SYSTEM_ERROR_OPTIMIND
December 16, 2022
About "System Error" (2021):
SYSTEM_ERROR
The first chapter of "System Error"
argues that there's a problem with
the "engineering optimization mindset".
The call this the "core issue":
".. well-intentioned optimizers fail to measure
all that is meaningful, and when their creative
disruptions achieve great scale, they impose their
values and decisions on the rest of us. A better
strategy would replace the blinkered technocratic
governance by coders and powerful tech companies
with the messy, inefficient, yet empowering Okay. But on the
process of deciding what values to promote through other hand, it's
what we call democracy." hard to see how
Democracy could've
made some sort of
reasonable decision
about the value
of the internet
It's almost a necessity back in the early
to first see technologies 90s, before most
deployed at scale before people had even
we have any clue about heard of email.
how much we "value" it.
There's a dance between capability,
customs, understanding and policy, and
there doesn't seem to be any simple way
to declare which should come first.
p. xxv:
"Facebook's business model is to increase the
time we spend on its platform and then sell
access to our personalized profiles to
advertisers and political operatives who seek to
manipulate our behavior and dump the by-product
of that manipulation onto our personal lives and
democratic institutions."
"These by-products are not accidental but a
reflection of the choices technologists make
when they design and launch new products."
Here they almost say what would seem to
me to be obvious. Let me say it-- and
leave open the question of whether the
authors here would agree:
The anti-social effects of social media like
Facebook are not some accidental by-product of an
"engineering optimization mindset": there was a
conscious decision to optimize for profits, which
imposed a need to optimize for increased traffic.
They presumably originally didn't know quite what
a perniscious effect they were going to have on
society, and when they did know, they evidently
didn't care.
If they were running a more conventional business
where they're the users were the customers, there
might've been (just maybe) a financial incentive
toward conveying better information, but working
as an advertising supported site created incentives
unrelated to the well-being of it's users.
Advertising supported media has severe
problems and always has had them, they
just became more noticeable in 2016.
p. xxiv
"The bloom is off the rose of the big tech companies.
We no longer hear so much gushing about the internet as
a tool for putting a library in everyone's hands, social
media as a means of empowering people to challenge their
governments, or tech innovators who make our lives better by
disrupting industries."
I would've said the optimism for an internet-enhanced
democracy faded quickly, after the first ten years of
the web. We haven't heard that kind of "gushing"
for nearly 20 years-- instead it's all been about
fantasies of instant riches. The idea that anyone
involved is doing something good for the world has
been very rarely invoked in recent years.
"The converstaion has shifted to the other pole.
Humans are being replaced by machines, and the
future of ... "
Well okay, but the fears of robots displacing
human labor has been a common theme for quite
some time.
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