Worldwithoutmind Quotes

“THE ALGORITHM IS A NOVEL PROBLEM for democracy. Technology companies boast, with little shyness, about how they can nudge users toward more virtuous behavior—how they can induce us to click, to read, to buy, or even to vote. These tactics are potent, because we don’t see the hand steering us. We don’t know how information has been patterned to prod us. Despite all Silicon Valley’s sloganeering about building a more transparent world, their ideals stop at the threshold of their offices.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“At the epicenter of Google’s bulging portfolio is one master project: The company wants to create machines that replicate the human brain, and then advance beyond. This is the essence of its attempts to build an unabridged database of global knowledge and its efforts to train algorithms to become adept at finding patterns, teaching them to discern images and understand language. Taking on this grandiose assignment, Google stands to transform life on the planet, precisely as it boasted it would. The laws of man are a mere nuisance that can only slow down such work. Institutions and traditions are rusty scrap for the heap. The company rushes forward, with little regard for what it tramples, on its way toward the New Jerusalem. (less)”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“In the olden days, big houses in New York impeded creativity—editing, printing, distributing a handful of volumes each year. If a writer somehow failed to catch the fancy of a New York publisher, she was consigned to irrelevance. Amazon disrupted the hell out of that arrangement. Anyone with a novel in a desk drawer could publish directly to Amazon.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“There’s a strong impulse in our culture to run away from these little corners. We’re told that society’s winners will be the thinkers who network, collaborate, create, and strategize in concert with others. Our kids are taught to study in groups, to execute projects as teams. Our workplaces have been stripped of walls so that the organization functions as a unit. The big tech companies also propel us to join the crowd—they provide us with the trending topics and their algorithms suggest that we read the same articles, tweets, and posts as the rest of the world. There’s no doubting the creative power of conversation, the intellectual potential of
humbly learning from our peers, the necessity of groups working together to solve problems. Yet none of this should replace contemplation, moments of isolation, where the mind can follow its own course to its own conclusions. We read in our little corners, our beds and tubs and dens, because we have a sense that these are the places where we can think best. I have spent my life searching for an alternative. I will read in the café and on the subway, making a diligent, wholehearted effort to focus the mind. But it never entirely works. My mind can’t shake its awareness of the humans in the room.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech