Tech elite pulls us into chaos

From “How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos, ‘’ by John Naughton, in The Guardian:

“Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.

“The purpose of this infrastructure was to enable companies to target people with carefully customized commercial messages and, as far as we know, they are pretty good at that…. And in doing this, [Facebook chief Mark} Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and co. wrote themselves licenses to print money and build insanely profitable companies….

“It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? ….

“My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. …

“Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated.’’

To read the whole piece, please hit this link:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/how-tech-leaders-delivered-us-into-evil-john-naughton