• The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
• At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
  • aggressive surveillance,
  • arbitrary suppression of content,
    • the censorship problem, and
  • the subtle manipulation of
    • thoughts,
    • behaviors,
    • votes,
    • purchases,
    • attitudes and
    • beliefs
  • are unchecked worldwide

• senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology

• Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
  • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
  • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
    • biased search results,
    • biased search suggestions,
    • biased newsfeeds,
    • platform-generated targeted messages,
    • platform-engineered virality,
    • shadow-banning,
    • email suppression, etc.
• Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
  • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.

• seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• One Billion Happy

Author

• Mo Gawdat

Description

• Mo Gawdat was former chief business officer at Google X, Google's innovation center.
• Mo left Google after seeing the rapid pace of AI development was going to lead to a progress trap in which
  • the risk of AI destroying human civilization is becoming real because AI will be learning from too many unhappy people whose trauma AI will learn and incorporate into its algorithms
• Hence, human happiness becomes paramount to prevent this catastrophe from happening

• https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F321797-a-short-history-of-progress&group=Q2X5j1pR