System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

The book "System Error: How Big Tech's Obsession with Optimization Is Driving a Future That Reinforces Discrimination, Erodes Privacy, Displaces Workers, and Pollutes the Information We Get" discusses how big tech's obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps to change course and reinvigorate democracy.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 16 September 2021
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors, this comprehensive guide reveals how big tech's obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves. In just a short span of time, a once-naive optimism about technology's liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. While many of us have accepted this technological future as inevitable, it doesn't have to be this way.

System Error exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech's relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professors - a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, a political scientist who served under Obama, and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also an early Google engineer) - reveal how we can hold that power to account.

As the dominance of big tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead. By reclaiming our agency and shaping a technological future that aligns with our values, we can create a more inclusive, democratic, and sustainable world.

Weight: 564g
Dimension: 164 x 240 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529356700