‘It’s time to take nerds out of power’, says internet pioneer – 08/12/2023 – Tech

“It’s time to get the nerds out of power,” says writer Jeff Jarvis of Silicon Valley executives and founders. For him, people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg should not have so much decision-making power.

Over time, people will stop perceiving the internet as a technological innovation, he says. It will be something given like the book, invented by Gutenberg in 1439. The discussion will then become about people. Jarvis starts from this comparison to reflect on the new era of data and connections in the book “The Gutenberg Parenthesis”, released in June and still not translated into Portuguese.

Mr. has discussed the transformative impact of Gutenberg’s invention. Why did you choose to return to the invention of the printing press in your new book?
I realized some time ago that the internet business is killing the mass media business model. With that, the idea of ​​mass also dies. To write about this, I would have to look at the history of media and where this demand for transformation came from. I’m fascinated by the Gutenberg character. He was an entrepreneur and technologist in the truest sense of the word. That’s where Gutenberg’s parenthesis theory comes in, from a Danish academic [Tom Pettit], who argues that the printing age was an exception in history and that we have the opportunity to recapture some of the aspects of what life was like before it. It got me thinking about what we can take advantage of now that we have moved out of the era of the printed word. Data has replaced the printed word as society’s organizing principle.

Mr. discusses in the book the institutional revolutions that the internet and AI (artificial intelligence) will bring. Will historical knowledge be crucial in the discussion of what society will be like in this new era?
History doesn’t repeat itself and technology doesn’t determine our destiny, we still make the decisions. But, yes, there are lessons from the past. One that I had in my research was how long it took forms of the printed word to take hold. It took 50 years for the book, as we know it today, to take shape, with an index, numbered pages and titles. Another 150 years before we see the modern novel, the essay, Shakespeare’s printed plays and the newspaper. It makes me wonder if we’re on a similar timeline on the internet today. AI and data might just be catalysts for change like the press was in the past, for change in an era my parents and others lived in.

Does this mean change in society?
The printing press, in principle, was seen as a great technology, but over time what was innovation becomes boring and taken for granted. But what did people do with it? Now we will see the internet in the same light, it will no longer be something for engineers and programmers. It’s not about their companies. It’s about human beings. It’s about how we connect and what we do with these tools. It’s time to get the nerds out of power. They shouldn’t be in charge of everything that humanists and humanities people should decide, as it used to be.

Good governance that empowers people should discuss who owns the data and chooses social media norms, right?
Yes, but people also expect a lot from the internet. Behind technology companies are human enterprises. The problem isn’t with technology, which connects us all, at our best and at our worst. We have very high expectations. The internet is nothing but one giant conversation, this isn’t going to be polished like the Sheet. It is a public square, where many people gather, some are smart, some are stupid and some are wrong. We shouldn’t expect companies to solve all problems, although we can demand that they do better. Silicon Valley people didn’t cause all of the problems in American society. The US was already a sexist, unequal and unfair country long before the internet.

Comparing the history of the printed word with the history of the Internet, can you say that the new Internet formats, such as Google’s Web 2.0 and social networks, are innovations such as the newspaper and the modern novel?
We don’t even know how to define what the internet is yet. We’re still busy trying to recreate the ancient world so that online publications look like magazines and newspapers. We didn’t reinvent education, which still prepares people to work in factories. Governments are still anchored to local platforms. My community can spread all over the world. There are already, anyway, small examples, and one of them is TikTok. For me, it’s the first platform built with collaboration in mind, which is only possible thanks to the internet.

And do the institutions and norms of before still work?
We need to reconsider them. Is intellectual property still worth something when we can collaborate together in every possible way? Those in power somewhat challenged the innovation that Gutenberg brought, the printing press had a great impact on the idea of ​​what a nation was, because it helped to standardize languages ​​and, consequently, the idea that people have of what a nation is . Will our form of organization be like this forever? I do not know, let’s see. I don’t mean to suggest that technology by definition changes all that, but it does give us the chance to make new decisions.

Can artificial intelligence change the way people express themselves on the internet?
Our status in society as writers turns out to be less important when a machine can write coherently. On the other hand, great language models, as they exist today, should not be used for journalism, because they get the facts wrong. But there are opportunities, I want to know if these models can help people who are intimidated to write or even help illiterates to tell their stories. I don’t agree with the people behind artificial intelligence who say that humanity will be destroyed, that’s exaggerated marketing.

In your book, Mr. it shows how the mechanization of the press has affected jobs, as we discussed what AI can do now, but that these people have relocated. Mr. Do you believe that workers will adapt to new digital activities?
The past shows that new technologies lead to new areas and new jobs. But it is hard to say this to the scribes who wrote every book in Germany before Gutenberg’s printing press, who were replaced as horses were by chariots. Part of society’s ego at the time of the press was to think that it could control or impede this process. James Dewar of the RAND Corporation points out that countries that tried to control the press did not develop as quickly as those where there was more freedom of print.

There are already sites made entirely by AI with no human editing and they suck.
We’re going to have to decide what’s credible and what’s not. Before, we hired journalists and editors to do this for us. Now, there’s this abundance of content, and it’s up to each of us to realize what’s true. The new services we need to invent may be there. The old editing and publishing institutions created in the printing age cannot handle the volume of discourse that circulates today. We need new institutions.

Part of society asks that new AIs be explainable, but even developers don’t understand how everything works within these algorithms. Is it important to solve this dilemma?
The idea that at some point we could explain the whole world is probably self-deception. The harsh reality will overwhelm us and show how little of the world is comprehensible. Science and studies explain part of reality. Philosopher David Weinberger says that machine learning can predict things better than we can, but he doesn’t offer explanations of how it does it. Everything is based on data. The model takes all the possibilities and tells you which one is most likely to happen. It will be frustrating for people and authorities when they understand this. David said something that fascinated me: we call an accident what we give up explaining.

If we don’t know how the decision was made, only that it was driven by data, wouldn’t that be different from being ruled by these algorithms, as if they were a god?
Yes, I don’t think we should listen to what the machines say in summary form, but take it as a mere given. If we used these machines to decide who gets arrested or who goes to college, it would be terrible. If we asked the machine the reason for this decision, we would have no answer. We still need to make human judgments and the machine can help us by defining risk factors for a loan, for example. But we also need to recognize that machines create bias by using data from the past and the past is full of bias, injustice and inequality. Only then will we adjust these systems so that they work responsibly.

These new companies often sell the idea that AI will be central to the development of humanity. Is this speech still marketing?
Some AIs are going to be able to do amazing things. They can evaluate incredible amounts of cancer data or imaging tests. Models can recognize patterns that our eyes don’t necessarily recognize. This could help doctors diagnose and even predict disease. But technology releasing millions of stupid stories isn’t going to help anybody. I don’t know how much AI is going to change the job market and our lives, probably not as much as these companies predict, but probably in many surprising ways.

It is very common for technology people to say that the world is experiencing exponential growth. It is feasible to say that we are at the same pace as the era of Gutenberg?
It’s hard to demonstrate exponential growth right now. It’s multiplying like never before. Adaptations need to be faster than ever before. That might be scary to some, but it doesn’t scare me, especially since I’m too old to know how this story will end. But nothing is inevitable, nothing is determined by technology, we have choices to make and we must make wiser decisions because we have the advantage of the lessons of the past.

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Jeff Jarvis, 69, is one of the first successful bloggers on the internet, with the texts he published on the website BuzzMachine. He broke down how Google works in the bestseller “What Would Google Do?” in 2011. He teaches journalism at the City University of New York and researches the internet.