ABOUT
In the technology policy and commentary world there’s enough pessimism and hand wringing each week that I thought it’d be worth highlighting the best of the bunch. You know, the articles that try to get us all worried about some sort of technology. Although the authors are using their hands to type out these articles, I imagine them wringing their hands while doing it. Or if it’s a podcast or video there’s lots of actual hand wringing. Each week I aim to provide a few quick thoughts on the best Hand Wring.
“The AI Contagion”: 8/14/20
This book, The Artificial Intelligence Contagion: Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and the Social Order?, is a doozy of a hand wring. Pessimistic AI books were all the rage 2-6 years ago, but thankfully have fallen out of fashion. Although I have not read this book, I did listen to the author’s interview on the First Things podcast and from his description it does not seem to add much to the overall literature. Rather it seems aimed at selling copies through fear. The author expresses his profound pessimism for the future wrought by AI where there will be revolutions from the working people and even seems to admire some Silicon Valley exec who pulled up stakes and moved to a remote area to be kept safe from said revolutionaries. Heavy! The author takes the extreme, conjectural side of AI’s effects on labor. For instance, he ignored research (at least in the interview) that says actually things are OK when it comes to automation’s/AI’s effects. I can always count on First Things to publish content like this. I would think a Christian-oriented publication would approach the future with more optimism and hope. Yes, there are biblical reasons to believe things will get worse before Christ’s return but Christ will be with us the whole time! So, cool your jets, First Things.
AI and Technology Up the Risk of Nuclear War: 8/7/20
The connection doesn’t quite make sense. Maybe it’s just me and I’m not convinced. Bryan Walsh of Axios’ Future newsletter wrote “How new tech raises the risk of nuclear war.” It perhaps overstates the effects of AI and only in the negative, detrimental sense while giving only a passing reference to the positive effects such powers might also have. AI is a tool that could be used for good or ill. The article also falls into the often overinflated risk of cyber warfare. Finally, the article compares the early days of AI to the early days of atomic weaponry. This is an odd and mismatched comparison on its face. Articles like these grab attention but use hand wringing to do it.
Diving Into The Shallows: 7/31/20
Last week we moved houses so I missed it. This week I published a review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains on The Upload, a Medium blog associated with my job at Stand Together. It is a book-length hand wring on its 10th anniversary. Some highlights: Citing an interview with neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who says the consequences of the internet’s effects on our brains could prove “deadly”; “We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls”; “The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation”; “Outsource memory, and culture withers.” I think we all see what we want to see in this book. More often than not though it is used as hand wringing ammunition. Our very brains are being changed by the internet after all!
Back in Action and “The World Hangs in the Balance”: 7/17/20
I took four months off from Hand Wring because there was enough to actually wring our hands about in the late spring and throughout the early summer. It seemed insensitive. But these crises have not gone away, the hand wringing over technologies has also resumed, so what the hey I figured it’s time to resume this too.
The indefatigable Casey Newton at The Verge wrote about the Great Twitter Hack of 2020, a moment that ruined the Wednesday night (if you’re in the US) of a small cadre of power users. The rest of us, including me, had no idea it happened until it was over. Newton ended his Wednesday newsletter with a hand wring of a sentence: “After Wednesday’s catastrophe, it hardly seems like hyperbole to suggest that our world could hang in the balance.” In early 2019 Twitter revealed for the first time their daily active user numbers: 126 million. The estimated world population is currently 7.8 billion. By my calculation thanks to a website–I am no math guy–that means active Twitter users are 1.6% of the total world population. I would argue on those numbers alone it actually is hyperbole to say “our world hangs in the balance.” And what does that phrase mean exactly? It sounds the Twitter hack represents an existential threat to our globe. Guessing from other analyses though, it means real world conflict and damage could have been provoked or could be provoked if Twitter were hacked. Granted, hundreds of thousands of dollars were lost in this scam. The hypothetical nightmare scenario where countries launch nuclear strikes at each other due to a false Tweet seems unlikely. To truly deceive multiple parties both responsible for taking action and those who verify such actions would be rather difficult. Instead I think Twitter and we will do what we always do: we will learn some things, we will forget some things, we will move on. But, all that to say, I would agree that it is not hyperbole if your world is Twitter.
Hand Wring Mad Lib: 3/6/20
This piece (from the Atlantic, where else?) had a unique twist in the title, intro and conclusion for articles of the type but the remainder of the 10 minute read was entirely predictable. It was so predictable I had to double check I was reading an article from 2020 and not 2012, 2016 or any other prior year. There’s the part about addiction, the part about Tristan Harris, the part about manipulation, the part about a poll, the part “But I’m not anti-technology or innovation” (I laughed out loud from the sheer disbelief that this was actually there! Like all the others!), and the vague, pie in the sky solutions at the end that try to strike a note of hope after the shower of negativity. It’s almost like there’s a computer out there cranking these articles out free from human oversight. To be sure, I am subject to formulaic writing and being a bore. But in the realm of techno-pessimism, this type of piece I have seen so often that it’s become a formula.
Democracy Is Being Undermined: 2/28/20
The masses have access to information! The Atlantic, a reliable source for hand wringing, reported on the recent Pew survey of 1000 tech experts’ opinion on the prompt “Between now and 2030 how will use of technology by citizens, civil society groups and governments affect core aspects of democracy and democratic representation?” The headline of the survey is “Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy.” Woof. All this seems dire. Perhaps it’s worth unpacking what the tech experts, The Atlantic, and Pew mean by “democracy.” Direct voting? Republican representation? Freedom? It appears to just mean the status quo. Maybe it gets into it in the Pew report, which I have not read thoroughly. Either way, this is hand wringing. As one of the experts quoted in the Atlantic piece implies, democracy has been around for 2000+ years and has faced new media shifts before. It has changed and will probably change again. This particular episode highlights the danger of commenting on tech’s impact on society without context–historical, emotional, economic, etc. When viewed through a pinhole, the world can easily be seen to be falling apart. But with an expanded view, things are getting better, we’ve faced trials before, changes will happen, and adaptation is more than possible.
We’ve Become Voyeurs: 2/21/20
What a headline: “Ring and Nest helped normalize American surveillance and turned us into a nation of voyeurs.” It got my click! Normalizing cameras everywhere, yes. But turning us into voyeurs? Maybe this is an indictment of our own predilections. Peeping Toms, nosy neighbors, and The Voyeur did not burst forth the morning after Nest’s cameras were released. I would wager those who spend an inordinate amount of time with cameras snooping on neighbors may have done that already? Can’t write an article about that though. “How many times a week would you say you look through your neighbors fence? Watch them load their car? Uh huh.” We’re making norms as we go when it comes to cameras. I tell my family about our cameras and do my best to remember to tell friends who check on the house. Our cameras have been extremely helpful during times we’ve been away for trips or health crises and for my wife who has accessibility needs. As for these claims about uncouth behavior “caused” by technology, let’s first look inward and see if that’s the source instead.
Virus Mis and Dis Information: 2/14/20
MIT Technology Review had a somewhat confusing article—at least when it came to the relationship between the title and the body—about social media spreading disinformation and making the COVID-19 outbreak worse! But wait! It’s actually helping health care experts find out who might be getting sick, advertising where to get help, and helping quarantined connect with each other in a time of need? That actually sounds pretty great. It also features rare praise for micro-targeting. Here perhaps we see hand wringing tactics that in fact spread what appears to be a mostly positive non-hand wring message. It’s also an excellent example for the positive and negative side of free(ish) (#China) flowing information.
REMOTELY CONTROLLED: 1/31/20
It was a strong week for hand wringers. But the article that started out the week ended up being the wringy-est: You Are Now Remotely Controlled by Shoshona Zuboff. (Zuboff is also the author of the hand wring tome “Surveillance Capitalism”). Yikes! First, this is a bold claim indeed to say I am remotely controlled. Second, I’ve read this article, the first chapter of her book, listened to two interviews and I’m still not sure—neither in her mind nor am I convinced—what’s so harmful about social media companies collecting data about my activity and then selling ads. She seems very concerned though. In her interview with Russ Roberts in EconTalk, he asked at least three times What’s the harm? Her eventual answer was information asymmetry, the big tech companies know more about us than we do about them…Okay…I prefer that kind of relationship with many firms/individuals like my airline and my neurosurgeon. Maybe I’m missing something? Anyway, Alec Stapp had a good summary of some of the best hand wring phrases in Zuboff’s NYT piece.
THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK: 1/24/20
Perhaps this is the very definition of hand wringing. What started in 1947, 7 minutes to midnight, has only gotten as far away from midnight as 17 minutes. Whatever that means. Whose idea was it to have a group of experts arbitrarily decide on these numbers? What does it mean if we’re 4 hours away? Is it possible to be mid afternoon? Will we just get infinitely closer to midnight? By 2055 will we be 2 nanoseconds from midnight approaching midnight infinitely closer? The scale seems way out of wack. Instead we get these headlines from The Chief Hand Wringers about how near we are to doom in what has been an (relatively speaking) incredibly peaceful last 60 years. I think I worried about this once years ago. Now I’m just numbed to it. It also (appropriately?) gets that one Iron Maiden song stuck in my head. That’s what it does for me now.
THE EVIL LIST: 1/17/20
This week Slate published an excellent hand wringer of an article: The Evil List. Evil walks among us! We give Evil our money! Granted, some of these are pretty bad and no company or institution is prefect. 25-30 for sure seem nefarious. But Airbnb? Heaven forbid people rent out their homes! Home prices would be rock bottom but for Airbnb! Facebook just seems a punching bag for folks whose feelings are hurt by others’ opinions or the EULAs we signed without thinking through what they might mean. The contributors often provided thoughtful explanations but the premise is certainly a Hand Wring.