System Error: How Big Tech Disrupted Everything and Why We Must Reboot by Mehran Sahami
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Name Yer Poison: Corporate Greed or Political Incompetence?

According to the three authors from Stanford University, America in particular and the world in general faces a stark choice. Either we allow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to create a technocratic dystopia of mass delusion and surveillance; or we create an alternative, equally dystopian, bureaucratic regime of corporate regulation to stop these greedy people producing the economic and social externalities that are now becoming overwhelmingly apparent. Not much of a choice really. But the authors want us to remain optimistic.

The three agree that the issue is about values and the sacrifices in some values that have to be made in order to promote others. They clearly don’t like the way those trade-offs are being made today. The technocrats only care about making money. Meanwhile the externalities caused by their success hurt enormous numbers of people, particularly those already on the margins of society. They suggest that the techies and tech-supporters in charge must develop a conscience about these externalities and act to mitigate them. They also would like the rest of us who are not involved in the industry to get back to thinking about what the common good really means. But mostly they insist that the government take action to rein in the capitalist excesses and to improve governmental technological skills. Really they’re writing about a reboot of an entire society not just an industry.

At times, the authors sound like they want to blow up capitalism. At other points, they appear to believe in the potential of a divinely omniscient power of democratic government to rationally sift through the intricacies of arcane technology to identify and address potential issues. And they surely want all of us to become au fait with the things that they think are most important about the technologies. But when it comes to explicit actions that might be beneficial, they get really vague, not to say puerile. In their hand and flag-waving about values, trade-offs, and “harnessing technological progress to serve rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies,” they bring little of significance to light.

They want debate, for example. I’m not at all clear what this debate would be about, who would organise and participate in it, or where it would take place. They want some sort of governing body for coders and engineers, something like a high-tech American Medical Association that would grant licenses to practice, or at least create and enforce codes of ethics. They want regulators and prosecuting attorneys who aren’t intimidated by the political power of big tech companies. They want to stop self-regulation, increase data-protection, promote stakeholder capitalism, severely restrict insider share-dealing, pursue anti-monopoly suits relentlessly. But they provide few details about the who, what, and where of any of this.

In the final chapter, the authors flip from concerns about grasping capitalism to concerns about inept democratic politicians, agencies, and institutions. They seem to implicitly recognise that the externalities, the unintended consequences, of government intervention in the industry are also real. “Despite our enthusiasm for the role of democracy in governing technology, our democratic institutions do not always inspire much hope,” they say. This is where they get a bit more specific. They would like to see the Office of Technological Assessment recreated at Presidential level. But can they or anyone else really believe that such a governmental body would be able to anticipate much less direct or even positively influence the work of tens of thousands of tech entrepreneurs and their backers much less enormous established corporations? Among other difficulties the revolving door would have to have an enormous capacity!

In short, the book has nothing new to say and nothing old that is worth saying again aside from a few self-justifying war stories. Joint efforts like this often seem to sink to a level of prosaic mediocrity. This could become a classic of the genre. Or perhaps as members of the Stanford faculty they feel hesitant about biting down too hard on the hand that feeds them. Their employer is not only physically at the heart of the problems they want us to know about, it also receives a great deal of funding from the folk creating those problems. And by the way, didn’t these guys along with their colleagues and students help to create these problems in the first place? So perhaps a certain ambiguity and frivolity is prudent. The faculty lounge will remain calm. The Stanford legacy committee will continue to pull in (and earn) big bucks. And no doubt the students will continue to sign up for their classes without fear of being type-cast as intelligent social parasites. So as a result of this little bit of light weight virtue-signalling nothing will change.

View all my reviews