This is an excellent framing for the times we live in. We’re in a complex age, and we continue to try to make it certain and efficient using everything from personality tests to AI. But this is at the risk of losing the things that got us here- from scenario planning to creativity, imagination, and shared understanding. Great perspectives and a very accessible narrative style.
Cathy O’Neil does a great job of highlighting the dark side of “software is eating the world” as biases are being codified into systems as Weapons of Math Destruction. Multiple examples are used to understand the three characteristics of this phenomenon – scale, opacity and damage. “Algorithms are opinions embedded in code”, and right now, we’re not doing a great job of it.
The world has seen five big extinctions in the last 500 million years, each of which led to the decimation of more than 75% of the species. But for the first time in history, we have a species which is capable of not just causing an extinction but being aware of it as well. I loved the book for the curiosity it evoked and adding a sense of romanticism in science.
The printing press was once called the biggest source of distraction, but technology has come a long way since then, and made sure that it is extremely difficult to not get distracted! Nir Eyal provides a systematic guide, keeping things simple, to navigate our personal and professional lives and become “indistractable”.
Industrial capitalism exploited nature and gave us the bounty of comforts we enjoy in the modern era. Surveillance capitalism is exploiting human nature. The consequences are that there is increasingly no refuge, no sanctuary, from the relentless efforts of corporations that are intent on controlling every facet of an individual’s existence. In the current trajectory, it will lead to a further consolidation of wealth and power. Not an easy read, but most definitely a must read.