Posted by alexzeitler 4 days ago
Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible.
But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it.
Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower.
The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans.
We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta.
The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example.
And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.
My concern is that Silicon Valley could end up becoming a place where it's all about entrenched incumbents, where it would be too difficult for startups and small businesses to compete, and where those who'd otherwise be willing and ready to compete against the incumbents are stymied by extremely high housing prices that discourage risk-taking, not to mention regulatory capture from the incumbents. Silicon Valley could morph into a place that stifles innovation instead of encourages it.
While I'm on this topic, it also seems to me that Silicon Valley collectively is losing the social goodwill it once had. I remember a decade ago people outside of the tech industry being very excited when they heard of one of their friends getting a job at a company like Google or Facebook. Google was still seen as one of the "good guys," and Facebook was still seen as a tool people loved that allowed them to connect with their friends and family. Yes, there was discontent in some parts of the Bay Area about gentrification fueled by an influx of tech residents combined with long-standing restrictions on housing development, but the broader society still thought highly of the tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular. Today that goodwill has been eroded. There are many people who don't think highly of the current generation of tech leaders; Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman seem to bring out different emotions than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did during their heydays (and I know Jobs and Gates had their detractors).
The difference, though, between Silicon Valley today and Silicon Valley in the past, however, is that Silicon Valley is a deeper part of our everyday lives today than it was in the past. The tech industry is bigger than personal computers and e-commerce; the tech industry today plays a major part of our lives. Tech has become vital infrastructure, much like how energy and telecommunication companies are. Maybe in the early days of electrification and telecommunications companies like PG&E and AT&T were better regarded, but eventually as these companies played an increasingly integral part of peoples' lives, these companies exploited this fact, and thus they lost their social goodwill. I can also think about how cars in American society undergone a transformation from being seen as a liberating force to being seen by some as an oppressive force (e.g., facilitating urban sprawl, car-dependent commuting, soul-crushing traffic congestion, etc.). Perhaps the tech industry has entered this life cycle, but I could definitely be wrong.
they are just as illustrative of some of the challenges that I’m pointing to, [such] as Elon Musk deciding who in Ukraine should and should not have access to Starlink internet connections. ... Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing. That political discrepancy can continue because of the legal gray zone in the digital realm.
Wikipedia has a good overview[0] but the basic debate was originally over funding of systems donated to replace a civilian communication network, and later over the use of the Starlink civilian communication system in attack drones, e.g. "Starlink legal documents claim it is not for use in weaponry as a military use of Starlink brings it under US export control laws like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR)" and "Shotwell explained that her company agreed with Ukraine's military using Starlink for communications but never intended to have them use it as a weapon. She added 'But then they started putting them on f---ing drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers [...] But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.'"
This author says "we need to bring the same level of legal clarity, accountability mechanisms, and transparency measures to the digital realm that we expect around other innovations such as medicines, chemicals, foods, cars, or even processes such as the decision to engage in foreign conflict" but uses as her case-in-point example the demand by a foreign military that a civilian communication system be enabled for use on novel drone weapons in a war where the United States is explicitly not a combatant.
Certainly legal clarity could be helpful for a situation like this, but I would hope the clarity is that a private company intentionally building a product for purely civilian use cannot be forced to modify that system to enable its use as an offensive weapon in a foreign war. Her argument seems akin to saying "Tim Cook arbitrarily decided Apple won't sell iPhones secretly loaded with remotely detonated plastic explosives for use by a foreign military - we need accountability here, this is destabilizing governance!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...
I'm looking forward to the next step in the discussion. Should this not be the case? Where do these notions that imply that the state doing something is better than a company? I'm not a libertarian or an extremist, but I've had to reject some pretty simplistic views that businesses are evil. The word coporation comes from the word Corpus, in a sense the people congregate, each with their own function as an organ to serve as a body. So it seems as noble a concept as the state. I can point to corrupt states or corruption in golden standard states as easily as I can do the same for companies.
Is there a disparity between the goals and the results of these organizations (Companies for selfless reasons, the state for the common good)? If so, is it sufficient to judge the organizations based on their results, or should we demand organizations not only to benefit the common good, but to expressly pursue it?
Finally, not for profits enter the fray as a potential intermediate option. OpenAI's success is pretty unprecedented, although the reputation of the NFP is irreparably damaged. Even if courts decide that whatever fuckery they are doing is all good by the law, in the trial of public opinion we can all agree that OpenAI walks like a dog and barks like a dog.
The first is that citizens have a say in who governs them. If the government does something they don't like, they can (at least in theory) vote for someone who will change it.
The second is that in most legal systems, there are differences in what governments are allowed to do and what corporations are allowed to do. For example, a government may be required to provide services to all citizens, whereas a corporation has the right to not serve certain people (such as "people who don't own a smartphone").
These differences aren't insurmountable, but it's something to keep in mind.
The author, however, fails to put forward any real criticism of government authorities who:
- Have much greater scale
- Are more opaque
- Engage more aggressively to control and manage narratives
- Are routinely shown to be subject to corporate capture---negating the fundamental point of the argument.
Tech companies (in spite of all of their warts) are at least promoting the free flow of information. This (free thought and expression) is the bedrock of every successful culture in history. Moreover, loss of these has been the downfall of almost every one of these cultures. Examples:
- Late Ming Dynasty China (16th-17th centuries)
- Late Ottoman Empire (18th-19th centuries)
- Fall of the roman empire
- Tokugawa era in Japan
- Ancient Greece after the execution of Socrates.
- Golden Age of Islam (9th to 10th centuries)
Pretty much all of these examples were cases where the political class enacted controls that prevented challenges to government orthodoxy and/or becoming more isolationist, and other avenues to preventing/controlling free speech in the name of "better social cohesion" and preventing bad influences (...cough...misinformation...).
So I cannot more vehemently disagree with the authors precept (especially since she is likely in a position to benefit from it)
The author has chosen to write about, and I quote "How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance"
This does not include, and is not obligated to include, any other factors that might destabilize governance.
As for the claims of virtue re: tech companies, I think they are overbroad and overpositive. There are several examples of tech companies violating any of the virtues you mention, and going head to head with government regulation to the determent of us all. This is not to say tech companies lack virtue, just that they may not all be the paramount morality that you seem to describe.
I can see a little of the pot calling the kettle black, sure, but I think we disagree on degree enough to call it a disagreement of kind.
There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about tech companies, who are pretty much uniformly becoming politically active (the Facebook-Google-Amazon-Apple axis being an especial concern, they seem to be relatively politically homogenous). But the new is still strictly better than the old; the combination of radio/newspaper/TV produces an unreasonable amount of misinformation (and government officials, for that matter).
The energy issue is a joke. We have had a massive shift from the 90s to today where the political system was set to prioritise environmental concerns above energy security. Even if it materialises a lack of energy has nothing at all to do with tech companies.
And political fracturing looks like it is mostly due to demographic pressure. Better communication is more likely helping than harming - if nothing else now we hear about the genocides instead of them being quietly swept under the rug. Facebook doesn't cause genocide, racialists cause genocides.
Marxist governments have caused exponentially more harm (e.g., genocides) than monopolistic companies.
Both are bad but the first one results in harm always.
churchill starved india. the list goes on.
the only genocide i can think of by a nominally socialist govt was the cambodian genocide, backed by the US and China, and the ppl in charge were really weird and not marxist. they were rigid idealists afaik. that genocide was halted by vietnamese marxists.
For anything to "result" from this, it would have to happen. What evidence do you offer for such a phenomenon?