World Without Mind
This was a very good book that I would recommend others read. It is rather similar to Move Fast and Break Things, which I reviewed a couple days ago, in that it targets Google, Amazon, and Facebook as all-powerful monopolies that may be doing irreparable harm to competition, democracy, and humanity. So, you know, just a minor thing to keep in mind when expecting two-day shipping or posting something online.
Franklin Foer is a distinguished writer and editor, who spent years at The New Republic. While he does harbor some resentment for the way he was most recently let go, his experience only comes through in a couple chapters, with most of the rest well-researched. He gives a good background and history on why we have anti-trust laws, and what it was supposed to protect. He goes into the back story of Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice who helped shape the concepts of privacy and how we think about what is fair for businesses to do, and then the characters in recent years who have helped dismantle that theory, thus allowing behemoths such as GAF to so dominate our lives.
He takes the idea of modern technology a step further than most, explaining how not only are they in a dominant economic position, they are also beginning to wrest free will from people. His position is that each business is doing some thinking for us (Amazon through its Recommendations; Facebook by down-selecting only posts that you will like; Google through search results), and that they are fiercely focused on doing more and more of those activities for individuals in the future. He even quotes Sergey Brin of Google, saying that that’s basically the long-term goal of Google’s ventures into AI. Foer had a fun section that explained the history of the algorithm, all the way back to where the name comes from, and how these algorithms have become so complex that it is likely that no single person knows how they work overall. He isn’t exactly a “rise of the robots” kind of fear-mongerer, but he does worry that we are building technology that perhaps nobody knows how to fully explain.
My big takeaway was to further entrench my belief in using any of these three companies as sparingly as possible. While they certainly have some benefits, the downsides and cultural decline may not be worth it in the long term. Foer does present one big, fascinating idea towards the end — that big businesses have brought big challenges in the past, and government responded with structures that helped contain these challenges. His idea is to create a Data Protection Authority, whose organizational mission would be to safeguard and oversee data usage, protection, individual ownership, and extrapolations that would be within society’s purview. The idea appeals to me with a limited scope, similar to how regulations govern what banks can do with our information, what mortgage companies must disclose, and what liability product makers have to take. Riffing off this idea, I could envision a third-party review, similar to an external auditor, evaluating the data structures and sales approaches of a business and issuing a professional opinion. But his big idea is that these companies, in such dominant positions, should not simply expect us to trust them; they’re too big and have shown too many improper business practices to date to just believe them.