The Unaccountability Machine Quotes

“Consider the example of a young person going down a YouTube rabbit hole. There’s a human intelligence taking in the content. There’s also an algorithmic system at work, showing them one video after another. You wouldn’t necessarily call the algorithm an ‘intelligence’, although it does seem to do things with a purpose. But then there’s a third entity in the background – the company that owns YouTube, and the structure of cause and effect that brought the other two things together. There’s no one person, or group of people, making the decision about what videos our hypothetical young person is being shown. In fact, the executives in charge of the parent company are sometimes horrified and distraught at the decisions made – in 2017, there was a scandal at YouTube when it was discovered that people were producing parody cartoons featuring beloved characters burning down houses or undergoing painful dentistry, and that these were being shown more often to innocent children than to the ironic adult consumers that were their intended target market. But somewhere, at some point in time, it’s been decided that ‘engagement’ is the purpose of the system – what it does – and somewhere else, a set of decisions have been made about what methods are going to be used to achieve that purpose.”
― Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind

“If the economy is an information-processing system, does that mean that every corporation is an artificial intelligence? If people are worried about out-of-control AI taking over the world and destroying everything, shouldn’t we have been trying to do something about them at least seventy years ago – and probably more like two hundred?”
― Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind

“The system of profit equations that Jerome Levy wrote down in 1914 anticipated a similar set of equations written down by the Polish economist Michal Kalecki in 1935. And Kalecki’s system is regarded by a lot of people as containing nearly all of what’s useful in J. M. Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 and widely accepted as one of the greatest works of economics ever. Levy went on to demonstrate that the proverb ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ was not applicable in this case; aided by his sons, the Levy family went into finance with sufficient success that the Jerome Levy Forecasting Institute they endowed at Bard College continues to promote their approach to economics today. You used to be able to buy a copy of the book Jerome wrote in 1943, Economics Is an Exact Science, from them; I got mine in about 2002. In the introduction to that book, Levy sets out his view of the purpose of capitalism: The working class is the original and fundamental economic class . . . The function of the investing class is to serve the members of the working class by insuring them against loss and by providing them with desired goods. The justification for the existence of the investing class is the service it renders the working class, measured in terms of wages and desired goods. The contrary is not true. The working class does not exist to serve the investing class. The working class has the right to insure itself through organizations composed of its members or through government, thereby eliminating the investing class.”
― Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind

“I have an uneasy feeling, for instance, that if the computer had been around at the time of Copernicus, nobody would have ever bothered with him, because the computers could have handled the Ptolemaic epicycles with perfect ease. Kenneth Boulding, ‘The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics’, 1966”
― Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind

“It is a sobering thought, for example, that despite employing some of the best and brightest* analysts in the world, the advice given by the US State Department over the last fifty years could comfortably have been outperformed by a parrot that had been trained to repeat the phrase, ‘Don’t start a war.”
― Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind

“A computer science professor called Ben Kuipers wrote a paper for a conference in 2012, in which he made the case that corporations met all the criteria necessary to be called independent beings, and that as such, they were artificial, intelligent and surprisingly successful in evolutionary terms.”
― Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind