To Err is Human

Evgeny Morozov is a technology visionary whose articles are appearing with more frequency in the pages of The Times. His recent “The Perils of Perfection” came out in March (NYT, 3/2/13), but at first one can’t tell if it’s an April fools prank. He describes LivesOn, “a soon-to-be-launched service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die.” He goes on to describe another site Superhuman and quotes the owner of the site's own description of a service that “helps people to be superhuman.” According to Morozov, technology is out to rid life of its intrinsic inconvenience. Boredom, forgetfulness are all on the chopping block, with the help of new products. He quotes Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook about a new app called Seesaw that enables you to “crowdsource absolutely every decision in your life” and brilliantly remarks that “Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon valley.” Ray Kurzweil, presents another version of this in his attempt to use microprocessors to remove the pesky problem of death. In The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil predicts that technology will eventually do what medicine can’t, which is to offer the promise of eternal life. What is interesting about Morozov is that he brings an old fashioned educated humanism to bear on the promise of a technological utopia. Underlying Morozov’s critique is the notion that abolishing imperfection places us into a morally ambiguous dehumanized universe. What other writer on modern technology would even have heard of Leszek Kolakowski's l964 essay, “In Praise of Inconsistency” more or less quoting it thusly, “this breed of the inconsistent is still one of the main hopes of the human race” (or could cite Ortega y Gasset as Morozov does). The specter of totalitarianism plainly informs Morozov’s aversion to millenarian technophilia. One wishes that the absurdities he offered in evidence were just jokes.

Algorithmic Big Brother is Watching

Evgeny Morozov

Big Brother is watching. He has always been watching. During the Inquisition, he was the Catholic Church. When the women’s movement was getting its legs, it was NOW. Now in our computer age, it’s not a religious organization or political interest group guarding its rights against language pirates, it’s algorithms. “Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation,” wrote Evgeny Morozov, the author of the soon to be released To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism in a recent Times Op-Ed piece (“You Can’t Say That on the Internet,” NYT, 11/16/12) “Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era—journalists, publishers, editors—don’t flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves.” Autocompletion is one of the areas which Morozov singles out and he uses George Carlins 7 words to illustrate his point. “See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site, “ he comments. “In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’). Of Carlin’s seven words, Google would autocomplete only ‘piss.’” Relax, at least it’s value free, might be one response to such algorithmic choices. Algorithmic censorship may turn out to be our first experience of the A.I. universe. Indeed, it’s not what the algorithm does, but what it doesn’t do that’s   the problem. Anyone who has ever received an automated telephone questionnaire from their insurance company, which provides yes and no’s but no maybe’s, will understand. Kafka foresaw it before there were any computers, in The Trial. It’s the tyranny and triumph of information, a dehumanized lynch mob made up of bits of data, determining our fate.