This appeared on the weekend:
‘Tech is tearing us apart’
The balance between humankind and technology has reached a tipping point, says this Silicon Valley insider – and we all stand to lose.
By Ben Hoyle
From The Weekend Australian Magazine
January 17, 2020
Reporting can be a scary job. I have had nervous moments with warlords, gangsters and neo-Nazis. I have been shot at and threatened. Once I had to endure, without displaying any outward sign of panic, the whole of Tonight’s the Night, the Rod Stewart musical. But if Tristan Harris is right, the presentation playing now on his phone is the most frightening thing I’ve seen in my life. It’s a road map for the erosion of civilisation as we know it.
Harris, 35, is a former Google insider who has been called “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” and a “Silicon Valley apostate”. He believes we’re in the midst of a great social upheaval caused by technology companies that view the world’s 2.7 billion smartphone users as a resource whose attention they can mine for profit. The resulting competition has a very unfortunate side-effect: “attention capitalism” is making us nastier, stupider and much less likely to find common ground with our fellow humans.
We can try to resist, but it is not a fair fight. Whenever you open Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, you switch on what Harris calls “a voodoo doll-like version of you in a supercomputer”. It consists of nearly everything you’ve ever clicked on, liked or watched. That’s how these companies keep you ensnared: they know you better than you know yourself.
Harris’s conclusions are controversial, but his influence is unmistakeable. He has briefed world leaders and is a confidant of some of the most powerful figures in the technology industry. He has testified to the US Congress. His two TED Talks have more than 4 million views.
More is at stake here than children spending too much time on screens, companies selling our data or hackers interfering in elections, Harris argues. What is actually happening is a fundamental rewiring of human brains, leading to behaviour “that is tearing apart our social fabric”, he says.
We’re in San Francisco’s business district, upstairs from the offices of the Centre for Humane Technology, the non-profit organisation Harris co-founded. He is slightly built, with vigilant eyes, and wears an old-school digital watch – a means of freeing himself from checking his phone.
Saving the world sounds exhausting. Harris’s Shortwhale page (a service for winnowing email overload) explains that for his “health and sanity” he minimises his email time. Potential contacts should bear in mind that every week he gets “10+ major media interview requests” and “10+ major speaking engagement inquiries”. Every month sees “10+ film documentary interview requests” and “10+ major inquiries from major governments”.
As soon as Harris starts his pitch, though, he gleams with evangelical purpose. Ten minutes in, he leaps to his feet and sketches a graph on a whiteboard to show the moment when technology will overwhelm humankind’s strengths: when artificial intelligence can do everything better than we can. It looks reassuringly far off. But then he opens up the presentation on his phone and homes in on a much earlier watershed. This, he says, is when the algorithms that churn away in the background of our lives achieve a form of stealth supremacy by hacking our human weaknesses: vulnerabilities such as vanity, social insecurity and susceptibility to information that affirms our existing prejudices. Technology doesn’t have to be so advanced to penetrate this soft underbelly. We’re there already. “The first crossing point was when it overloaded our mental limits, which we feel as information overload,” Harris explains. That probably happened in the early Noughties, he says. Then smartphones arrived and became a portal through which apps such as Facebook could reach “and grab the puppet strings of your self-image and social validations”.
Since then, our relationship with technology has had profound effects. “You get shortening of attention spans, addiction, disinformation, narcissism, outrage, polarisation,” he says. This is measurable. A 2018 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that fake news spreads six times faster than accurate news. The same year, FaceApp went viral by offering users a chance to generate plausibly aged images of themselves and share them; thus did its Russian-based designers persuade 150 million people to hand over images of their faces, paired with their names.
The most damaging development is the most recent. Harris calls it “the checkmate”. This is when technology “attacks the foundation of what we trust” via fake news, bots and deepfake videos. Even if you boycott the internet, people around you might be radicalised by YouTube videos or choose not to vaccinate their children because of misinformation spread online. Tech-influenced crises are erupting everywhere. “This is a self-reinforcing system that gets worse as [the problems] feed each other,” Harris says. “We call it ‘human downgrading’. This isn’t the privacy problem. This isn’t the data problem. This is the diagnosis for why all this shit is going wrong at the same time.” He often quotes evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson, who said: “The real problem of humanity is [that] we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”
Belief in truth and facts is slipping away at a time “when it has never been more urgent… [for] the whole world to see our world’s problems the same way very quickly”, Harris says. I feel myself recoiling from the dystopian forecast on his phone. He grins. “I try to stay lighthearted, but that’s why we lose sleep. That’s why we work so hard.”
Vastly more here:
If you want to have a detailed introduction this link gets you to the two TED talks.
Here is the write up:
Tristan Harris: How better tech could protect us from distraction
How often does technology interrupt us from what we really mean to be doing? At work and at play, we spend a startling amount of time distracted by pings and pop-ups -- instead of helping us spend our time well, it often feels like our tech is stealing it away from us. Design thinker Tristan Harris offers thoughtful new ideas for technology that...
Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day
A handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they're all competing for one thing: your attention. Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and ...
I can’t but agree that our lives and capabilities are being changed by tech and social media in all sorts of unexpected and really unexamined ways.
It is only when you stand back and examine the outcome of all the incremental changes that have rolled out over the last decade or two do you come to see what we have gained and what we have given away.
From a Digital Health perspective the smartphone and relevant apps can make a positive difference in all sorts of areas but if they lack the relevant security and privacy attributes they can scatter your personal information all over place and out of your control as was found recently by a study in the Financial Times.
See here:
How top health websites are sharing sensitive data with advertisers
To me the bottom line is that pretty much everyone thinks they can do anything with your private information and searches until they are called out – and then they will do the minimum possible to seem to have fixed the problem.
Until this mindset is totally and transparently reversed then I think one needs to exert extreme vigilance with any site or app you use.
Additionally many evil actors seem hell bent on deception and sewing confusion!
So tech is both changing the way we see and access the world as well as gathering everything possible to make it as easy as possible to market to and exploit us.
I suspect a reckoning is coming soon with very vigorous attempts from citizens and Government to try and get back to information and news reliability, non-abused trust and sensible privacy protection.
What do you think?
David.
There is a growing number who are finding that things are getting out of control. Sadly there seems to be enough sheep to keep the revenue rolling in.
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