Next week, we debut Season Two of the Technically Optimistic podcast. The theme, as I’ve mentioned, is data. It’s a natural follow-up to Season One, which focused on AI. As I spoke to lots of people about AI, it was instantly clear: You can’t have AI without data. Lots and lots (and lots) of data.
Our relationship with data is complicated. It makes our lives more efficient and personalized. It makes us seem smarter in terms of how we interact. And it’s also constantly being gathered from us without our knowing it. Today’s information economy runs on data, and you’re participating in it, without even knowing it or having a say in it..
I was lucky to speak with incredible experts, from the inventor of cookies (believe it or not, he created them to protect your privacy) to Amba Kak, the woman behind the AI Now Institute, who is fighting to put bright lines around data use as a way to correct what she calls information asymmetry. Of course, I want you to listen to the episode, but I wanted to give you a couple of previews of what we’re talking about as a thought-starter.
What Is Data, Really?
Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University who also works as the chief data scientist at the New York Times, shared an illuminating definition: “I will tell you a linguistic fact that I like to hang on to, which is the etymology of the word data, which means something given. And I like that sort of vision that somebody just gave it to you.”
In How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, the book that Chris wrote with Princeton Historian of Science Matthew L. Jones, today data really means data-powered algorithms. These are usually deployed, he says, by private companies that are shaping our personal, political and professional realities. While we begin our online lives choosing what we look at, purchase and share, our decisions constantly determine the information we receive, whether it’s TikTok videos, political ads or LinkedIn job listings. And once you’ve applied for that job, they can influence whether we get that interview.
Chris has more illuminating things to say about data in the episode. They lead us to another interesting concept…
Welcome to Surveillance Capitalism
Companies like Google and Meta give us services for free. But as Shoshana Zuboff says, they think we’re free. The professor emerita at the Harvard Business School is the author of the influential book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which tracks tech companies’ discovery that they could not only secretly capture people’s private experiences, but also profit from them. That means we’re not only the product, we’re the raw material shaping the products that are then being sold back to us. This, my friends, is the surveillance economy, and we’re powering it.
“Power” might not be the right word. That’s because users have very little power when it comes to understanding how the algorithm works or what’s being marketed to us. And as my guest Ethan Zuckerman — who is a professor at UMass Amherst, a longtime technology writer and a key player in the history of the internet — told me, “It is almost certainly changing our behavior. And frankly, most of us aren’t even really aware.” Zuckerman had a fascinating insight that has stuck with me: “A lot of us are doing sort of calculations about what we do and don't share online, what we look for and don't look for, what different personae we're keeping to try to handle our relationships with the surveillance internet. And I suspect those subtle forces actually are extremely powerful and worth investigating.”
We look at this and more in the new season, dropping on April 24. Please subscribe and hear the full episode, with more to come soon.
Worth the Read
The American Privacy Rights act gets a great breakdown as part of Digiday’s WTF explainer series. WTF is APRA, anyway?
Actors and musicians get a 5-year protection from AI’s perceived threats, thanks to a deal between SAG-AFTRA and major record labels.
I wrote about Limitless, the AI pendant that records and transcribes everything you say throughout the day, while it was in beta. Well, the day has come. Will marriages be saved? Jobs preserved? Staying optimistic here.