EP 215 (152/365) System Error

By vinodnarayan on November 23, 2021 • ( 0 )

What do you get when a Philosopher, a Technologist and a Public Policy expert come together? You get ‘System Error’… Just wrapped up this interesting book about ‘where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot’ It is an interesting read written by Stanford Professors Rob Reich, a philosopher, Mehran Sahami, a Technologist and Jeremy Weinstein, a Political scientist…. It is interesting…

We know the big Tech companies are really big.. and after Cambridge Analytica incidents.. Twitter bans of prominent people and documentaries like Social Dilemma… and more recently the Facebook Whistle Blower… which happened after this book…. We all know something is not right… But then the question who should fix….

With the prospects of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Cars are coupled the fear of losing jobs and issues of privacy and even the impact to democracy… when we see that even democratic elections could be meddled with…. This is not a problem of one specific group…

It is not just a technological problem… It has to do with society, politics and democracy… it definitely involves the discussion on Ethics… That is why the three people with their varied backgrounds and working in the Valley has a lot to offer..

While talking in detail about the book is beyond the scope of my daily rant… there are some very important questions we all can ponder about… First we all need to understand that we live in a world that is imperfect… and in my opinion thinking that some technology can one day hack that imperfection into perfection is not right either… But can we use technology to make lives better.. May be we could….

This better tomorrow will not happen through optimizing the algorithms… Now coming to algorithms… will algorithms ever be fair… Can it be…? Can we leave all decision making to the AI? If not all… what all…?

Can Disruption and Democracy go hand in hand…? What is the cost we can pay for privacy…? If we were to live together with smart machines what will being human mean… what all will it encompass….

What is Freedom of Speech…. When we live in our social media echo chambers and become more and more closed.. What consequences will it have in our physical life…?

Where and how will People, Tech companies and Governments converge to make a fair world for all of us… People having work…. and being able to earn a living…. What about Universal Basic Income….

I know these are all questions… these and more… awaiting a reboot… it is a fascinating ride…. I hope you get to read the book sometime….