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Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

nytimes.com

41–50 of 295 posts

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#41
Technology solves some problems. It also creates some problems. The fundamental issue lies in the fact that we've lost sight of the ends technology is supposed to be in service of, and the development of technology for technology's sake (or more often, for economy's sake) has become the unconscious, inarticulate end of the world's major players.

As Sundar states, it is not that technology in itself is, in its essence, problematic, nor has it become the source of all humanitarian issues. The issue is an apparent incapacity or unwillingness on the part of most of the participants in the technological sphere to question the ideologies that underlie the development and deployment of particular technologies. Compound this with technology's tight coupling to the prevailing global economic structure and you're dealing with an aspect of human life that is as thorny and difficult to comprehend as it is constitutive of modern existence.

Here's a question: to what extent do algorithms mirror human reasoning and to what extent does human reasoning (at the macro level of social patterns) begin to mirror the predominant algorithms in use today? One's exposure to particular phenomena in a systems context is more or less dictated by the algorithms and structures the system employs (its rules and ontology). This is why an overly technified approach to social problems, such as politics etc., reduces the depth of social understanding and interaction. Because technical systems ultimately have to serve economic ends, whatever moral or social ends they might serve are eclipsed.

Social technologies are geared toward keeping users happy or blasting them with advertisements because doing so serves the economic ends necessary to keep said technologies functioning. Unfortunately, keeping users happy is often counteractive to other ends which we might reasonably say rest on morally and socially superior ground. Individual experience becomes systematic and "algorithmic" to the extent that the only inputs that remain in a grossly technological society are filtered through fixed patterns of technological interaction.

Twitter's character limitations, for instance, not only affect the system of twitter itself but conspire with its popularity as a means of social interaction to place strictures and limits on the very nature of modern social interaction. Thought, so often subject to truncated expression through mediums like Twitter, itself becomes truncated. Dialogue, which is given no space on social media platforms where people "comment" and "react" but never discuss begins to disappear as a meaningful, commonplace social practice. Thoughts and opinions are radicalized and tribalized. We participate in fixed echo chambers comprised of fellow individuals whose membership was not determined through a complex social process, but rather through an algorithmic process, which dumbs down the quality, depth, and sophistication of group formation and interaction.

Systems originate as expedients to serve some historical end and soon, by extension and unreflective adoption, dictate behavior, and dictate the ends.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#42

(Please try to respect the netiquette when voting.) Empty words by Sundar Pichai employed to achieve a desired effect in Google's benefit. The airplane is an example of a technology that has brought us closer together and helped advance the ideal of an interconnected global "village" and which I'm contrasting with the promise made for Google's products -- but don't get hung up on my example, because my argument is di…

The aeroplane has also made the world a far more insecure place (e.g. the UK was protected from contintental Europe by the English channel and her navy before the advent of the air-age) and a far more dangerous place (e.g. look at WW2, the dropping the atom bombs, the Vietnam War).

It it also, ahem, playing a leading role in our environmental self-destruction.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#44
I'm likely to get some downvotes for posting this, but the title reminds me of this talk [1] by the well known man called Billy Graham. The three problems technology cannot solve:

- Human evil

- Human suffering

- Death

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90mj79GqWhc

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#45
post #7

To put the title into context: "Do you still feel like Silicon Valley has retained that idealism that struck you when you arrived here?" "There’s still that optimism. But the optimism is tempered by a sense of deliberation. Things have changed quite a bit. You know, we deliberate about things a lot more, and we are more thoughtful about what we do. But there’s a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn’t solve h…

Thanks to my engineering abilities + Google + Reddit, I learned embedded systems and built a dishwasher that cleans and sets your dinner table.

Until the world gets violent, technology is solving problems. Even then, it will be the politicians, not the programmers who caused this.

EDIT: HN whales, I'll never understand your silence.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#46

(Please try to respect the netiquette when voting.) Empty words by Sundar Pichai employed to achieve a desired effect in Google's benefit. The airplane is an example of a technology that has brought us closer together and helped advance the ideal of an interconnected global "village" and which I'm contrasting with the promise made for Google's products -- but don't get hung up on my example, because my argument is di…

Let me tell you about the time they wanted to put my software for commercial jets on a military plane... I bowed out and my software is purely safety related, but I’m sure it’s out there carrying around guns and bombs and military vehicles.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#47
post #7

To put the title into context: "Do you still feel like Silicon Valley has retained that idealism that struck you when you arrived here?" "There’s still that optimism. But the optimism is tempered by a sense of deliberation. Things have changed quite a bit. You know, we deliberate about things a lot more, and we are more thoughtful about what we do. But there’s a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn’t solve h…

> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people and China to be more oppressive until its workers protested. So he's right about humanity having to solve its problems but he's forgetting that Google, the corporation, is opting to make it harder for humanity to solve its problems by enabling those who do not have humanity's best interest in their heart.

> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people

The world is complicated, and things are never as simple as that.

Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing?

It is always too easy to ignore the world as it is and focus on a utopian case. War will happen, with whatever tools are available.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#48
Is code truly amoral? Technology is not morally neutral. It embodies a set of values, a framework and an ideology. For instance, Google search engines have intrinsic properties that make them inherently and irredeemably flawed, because they attempt to infer intellectual properties, such as the meaningful content of a web site, from physical properties. Search engines rely primarily on query term location and query term frequency, sometimes boosted by other computable factors, such as link popularity. These pseudo-intellectual technologies such as search engines and metasearchers, are not morally neutral they fundamentally alter exosomatic conditions of our being as sensemaking entities. We now have new intellectual technologies coming to ascendancy: information architecture, knowledge management and intelligent infrastructure. Now is the time to raise questions about their non neutrality instead of abdicating such responsibility - for if anyone has agency it's the firm that designs these algorithms.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people and China to be more oppressive until its workers protested. So he's right about humanity having to solve its problems but he's forgetting that Google, the corporation, is opting to make it harder for humanity to solve its problems by enabling those who do not have humanity's best interest in their heart.

> Google was enabling the DoD to be more efficient at killing people The world is complicated, and things are never as simple as that. Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing? It is always too easy to ignore the world as it is and focus on a utopian case. War will happen, with whatever tools are available.

> Would you consider drones and smart bombs bad when the alternative is carpet bombing?

No one was ever going to carpet bomb a wedding.

Re: Sundar Pichai: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’

#50

Technology absolutely solves humanity's problems. There's pretty much no problem that given a large thoughtful effort, technology has not solved. The problem is that humanity is bad at choosing where to invest in technology. Our society has been set up so that orders of magnitude of more money is spent on advertising technology than clean energy, sanitation, sustainability, and ethical food production. Technology is…

You're certainly correct that the major problem is social, economic, and structural, but I do think there are some technologies that are inherently tricky to justify regardless of the economic structures they arise in.

The atomic bomb is one obvious example of a technology that seems to be inherently bad not only for humanity, but for biological life itself.

You could argue that the problem of the bomb is more-so a problem of finding a bad technical solution to the problem of war, but it's quite difficult to think of a beneficial application of the atomic bomb, and thus, very difficult to justify its invention from a moral/valued standpoint.

I think it's also a problem that we seem to treat technological progress as a glorified end for humanity—we find it very difficult, for whatever reason (perhaps economic as you point out) to have the courage to admit when something shouldn't be invented, even if it presumably can be. I think part of this stems from the co-opting of science by technology, and science's silly claim to be "value-free" and neutral—which has had some disastrous consequences. If I'm engaged in a value-free enterprise, I have no reason to stop and wonder what devastation or havoc my creation might one day wreak, I'm doing it, after all, in the name of science, or progress, of unreflective pursuit of an end I can't forsee.

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