Book review: How Facebook and Google are leading us to a ‘world without mind’. By Sushil Aaron

By Dilip -
“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” -Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, now executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc.

humans are outsourcing thinking to machines... algorithms are relieving humans of the burden of choosing and thereby eroding free will itself.

Big tech firms like Facebook, Google and Amazon have become indispensable presences in our lives. We are addicted to these platforms as they steer us to unseen news, gossip, products and entertain-ment. We check our mobiles through the day, attempting to skate over micro-moments of anxiety and boredom through the endorphins that clicks and ‘likes’ generate. We are experiencing a civilizational transition and thinkers in various disciplines are grappling with the significance of the moment.

Among them is Franklin Foer, a former editor of the New Republic, who offers a fascinating look at how Big Tech is reshaping humanity, democracy and world culture at large in his new book World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. His argument is straightforward – data is indeed the new oil, big tech firms are harvesting our personal data in granular detail; they build user profiles to provide us services we seek and push targeted advertising alongside. More crucially their (secret) algorithms decide what we see and do not see; they are constantly curating the knowledge we are exposed to, they determine “the news we read, the goods we buy, the path we travel, the friends we invite into our circle.” Our thought-life is, to a significant extent, being shepherded by machines.

This plays out in several ways. Producers of content, like newspapers and magazines, are dependent on these platforms for distribution of their material but users have little control on what appears on their feed. Facebook users ordinarily go through a fraction of what they expect to see because its algorithms prioritise the material. Google, likewise, classifies knowledge and imposes order, as Foer says, on the bewildering mass of material and tailors our engagement with journalistic and academic material. The thing about algorithms is that while they scan data for patterns, they can be also mani-pulated to serve specific purposes – to reflect “the minds of its creators, the motives of its trainers”. Amazon “steers you to the sort of books that you’ve seen before” while “Netflix directs users to the unfamiliar”, because “obscure fare” is cheaper for the company to stream rather than blockbuster films. Google can “suppress pornography” and “not…anti-Semitic conspiracists”, its search results privilege recent articles rather than older ones. 

Facebook’s ability to influence people is increasingly well-known; it has run experiments to see if emotions are contagious, it has “bragged about” increasing voter turnout and organ donations “by subtly amping up the social pressure that compel virtuous behaviour.” The impact of political ads on Facebook placed by Russia-based entities during the US presidential election is now being unravelled. The Trump campaign used Facebook effectively while Barack Obama’s reportedly drew on Google Analytics during the 2012 election.

Foer argues that the capacity of Big Tech firms to act as gatekeepers of knowledge and actively influence peoples’ views gives these firms “tremendous cultural power”. People are increasingly accessing worlds of knowledge primarily through Facebook, Google and Amazon and this leads Foer to conclude that humans are outsourcing thinking to machines, that algorithms are relieving humans of the burden of choosing and thereby eroding free will itself. One of the problems with this situation is that Big Tech platforms are agnostic about quality and are not particularly interested in elevating people’s sensibilities…. Read more
http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/how-facebook-and-google-are-leading-us-to-a-world-without-mind/story-UYGUA7iRc3SD9DDQPc3MfN.html

 see also
Who Owns the Internet? What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture. By E. Kolbert
Franklin Foer : Putin’s Puppet


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