Saturday, August 26, 2017

Book Nook: To Save Everything, Click Here

I was recently sent a book that was very timely, even though it was originally published several years ago: To Save Everything, Click Here.

In today's day an age, many people look at technology as the solution to all of the world's problems. Because of the success of things like citizen science, crowdsourcing, and more, hopeful entrepreneurs and developers are looking at ways to leverage technology even further.

No one would argue that's a bad thing in and of itself, but it's important to look at things with a healthy dose of skepticism. That's exactly what author Evgeny Morozov does. In the introduction, he paints the rosy picture of the "ideal" Silicon Valley vision - and then throughout the book, dismantles it. He points out that not everything can be quanitified, and that the approach to treating everything like an algorithm is that it takes the complexity out of moral, political, and other dilemmas.

It's a book that's worth a read to temper all of the rose-colored predictions - but at the same time also taken with a grain of salt, since our society doesn't yet reach the point of Big Data controlling everything. I thought it was an intriguing look at what technology can solve - and a good thought-provoking read about what it should solve.

No comments:

Post a Comment