Rob Reich

The Stanford-professor authors correctly observe that the wrongness of today's big tech includes "data breaches, surveillance capitalism, biased algorithms, and rampant misinformation" (p 26). They interestingly identify the root cause as an "optimization mind-set" on the part of the founding engineers and computer scientists, as well as the founders' later association with venture capitalists and involvement in politics. There are in-depth chapters on the dire problems with algorithmic fairness, privacy, AI, and social-media speech. As for how the problems might be corrected, I'd say, the book is less strong -- partly because it stresses the need for a milieu of democracy, which in the US seems to be in great danger of giving way to Trumpian autocracy by the mid-2020s.… (más)