The confessions of John Markoff, veteran NY Times tech reporter
Steve Jobs proclaimed that computers are the bicycles of the mind. John Markoff, a Pulitzer prize-winning technology and science writer for the NY Times for 28 years and author of many books about the computer revolution, now chides himself for having been, like many reporters of his time, “deferential about technology” and slipping into Jobs’s reality distortion field.
“Silicon Valley,” he said before a full crowd at UC Berkeley’s Second Annual Esther Woijcicki lecture April 9, “has had a sympathetic technology press.” Which included Markoff.
This lecture was sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Tad Taube, the SF philanthropist and former real estate investor, who named the lecture series for Woijcicki, a Cal journalism major, after discovering through a DNA sample on 23andme ( founded by one of Woijcicki’s daughters) that he and Esther were second cousins.
Markoff said that he and other tech reporters ignored the warnings of prescient sci fi writers like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, who foresaw and described the technology that has created “a surveillance culture that would put George Orwell to shame.” Instead they bought into Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow’s utopian manifesto of a virtual space that was free from the constraints of “meatspace.”
With gentle prodding from moderator and fellow Pulitzer prize winner and investigative journalist Lowell Bergman, Markoff turned to uncover the dark side of technology, the unintended consequences, which is why he said, “Visionaries are always wrong.” A case in point is the genocide and exile of a minority community in Myanmar, spurred by fake news on Facebook posted by that government’s military.
“Facebook is deeply in trouble on many fronts,” Markoff said, although in public hearings its CEO maintains the company doesn’t have control of its content.
Someone asked how much money Facebook made over the video of the recent Christchurch killings. “I’m sure they know,” responded Markoff. “Facebook speaks out of both sides of their mouth. They convince advertisers they know everything and regulators they know nothing.”
Should big tech companies like Google and Facebook be broken up, as proposed by U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren? Markoff thinks this will happen but not in the immediate future and pointed out the irony of Google protesting it be broken up when previously it joined forces with other tech companies to break up Microsoft’s monopoly on the market.
These tech monopolies, which Markoff terms Little Brothers, include corporate actors like Google and Facebook that acquire large bodies of data and use it for commercial ends. He warned that anyone who uses the Internet cannot escape the constant surveillance of these corporate entities.
“Resistance is futile. We are being assimilated,” said Markoff.
“You’re in this world where you’re surrounded by a soup of algorithms and they are mostly opaque. They have an agenda and we don’t know what it is.”
The talk then turned to the use of artificial intelligence used for warfare. A short video scarily depicted tiny drones programmed to target and kill thousands of university students who had joined a protest movement on social media. The film, “Slaughterbots,” was made by retired UC Berkeley computer professor Stuart Russell to oppose the use of autonomous weapons. htt
Markoff said that the component parts for such weapons are already a reality. The U.S., China, and Russia do not want a ban on autonomous weapons, and Markoff said the only deterrent was to promote the spread of human-centered AI programs to instill values in engineers.
“The only thing that is going to save us,” he said, “is engineers with those human-centered values.” And Markoff continues to record those values in a biography he is writing about Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog creator, founder of the Well --the first online forum -- and inspiration for the environmental and hippie movements that continue to rankle some and inspire others today.
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