CHAPTER 18
"A Cloud Lifts"
p. 396
The EU set the ball rolling with first attempts to establish ethical frameworks around privacy and data protection: See "How Europe became the world's top tech regulator", CNBC, March 25, 2021; "Big Tech isn't ready for landmark EU rules that take effect tomorrow", Ars Technica, Aug 24, 2023; "Facebook faces $3.2 billion UK class action over market dominance", Reuters, January 13, 2022; "Federal Trade Commission Expected to Launch Effort to Expand Online Privacy Protection", The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2022; "Meta Pauses Purchase of 'Supernatural' Developer as FTC Suit Proceeds", Bloomberg, August 5, 2021. On a more cautious note: "We take a look at proposed Big Tech regulations in the UK: Heavy on possible fines, light on enforcement (Online Harms draft gets most things right, still gives Facebook and friends too much leeway)," The Register, 16 December, 2020.
I expect to be doing this for the rest of my life: If learning Sonic Pi or Tidal or Foxdot is equivalent to learning guitar, SC is violin. Lifetimes could be (and are) spent exploring it, supported by a vibrant community including some transcendent coders doubled as remarkable musicians—and vice versa. Much as I cared for Python and its community, the longer I spent with SuperCollider the more I felt like ET in the Spielberg movie, knowing I'd caught a glimpse of home. I loved that the system's mid-Nineties creator was named McCartney (James); that his interest in making it began with the Moog-based classical reimaginings of Wendy Carlos' 1968 Switched on Bach album then continued through the seventies work of hairy German "Kosmische" masters Tangerine Dream—while tapping a computer music lineage stretching all the way back to Ada Lovelace herself.
setting an example regulators in the United States and elsewhere are following: See "F.T.C. Sues to Block Meta's Virtual Reality Deal as It Confronts Big Tech," New York Times, July 27, 2022.
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it took seconds to sense the fingerprints of mainstream Silicon Valley: This infiltration doesn't always come from the Valley itself. Teachers there adopt tech jargon and ideas that will obviously appeal to parents in the catchment area. For a glimpse of how this works, try Education Week, November 1, 2017, "Schools Take a Page From Silicon Valley With 'Scrum' Approach," about schools borrowing the programming idea of Agile project management directly from big business. I could cite many similar examples, both in Silicon Valley and (increasingly) elsewhere.
how does an Amazon CEO justify earning 6,000 times the median salary at his company: Against circa 350 across the economy (up from 61 in 1989 and 21 in 1965) . . . mindboggling details in "Amazon CEO Andy Jassy earned 6,474 times the median Amazon employee's salary," Fortune, June 2, 2022; Economic Policy Institute, "CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322% since 1978", August 10, 2021.
at the end of 2022 Google and Twitter featured prominently in a roster of companies trumpeting support for democracy, sex, gender and race equality while providing financial support to politicians clamoring to undermine those things: As reported in "Twitter donates $25,000 to anti-abortion political organization," by the excellent Popular Information substack newsletter, August 3, 2022; see also "How corporate cash could help make an extremist the next governor of Pennsylvania," from the same source on July 28, 2022, along with "These 25 rainbow-flag waving companies donated $13 million to anti-gay politicians since 2021," June 2, 2022.
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as the Silicon Valley showrunner Alec Berg noted in explaining why he and partner Mike Judge pulled the plug on their popular show in 2019: As reported in "'Silicon Valley' Showrunners Talk Ending HBO Series: 'It's a Different Kind of Comedy Now,'" The Hollywood Reporter, December 8, 2019.
school curricula are moving this way: "A new curriculum for the Netherlands including Computational Thinking", LearnTechLib, June 24, 2019; "Paving the Way for Computer Science in German Schools", Researchgate, August 2018; "National curriculum in England: computing programmes of study."
Calls for kids to be taught programming from as young as three grow by the year: A few years back the distinguished British commercial software pioneer Dame Stephanie Shirley noted that her first generation iWatch contained every feature a user could want—save the one guaranteed to improve the lives of at least half the population by monitoring a menstrual cycle. Clearly there hadn't been enough women on the team that developed the device, she said, issuing a now-familiar call for the coding net to be cast wider. Top of her suggestions for transforming code culture was to introduce all kids to programming from the earliest possible age, as young as three—an idea repeated many times and with escalating urgency since. See "Dame Stephanie Shirley: 'we were part of a crusade to get women into business,'" The Guardian, 8 March, 2017.
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most continental European educators introduce these skills later than is conventional in the Anglosphere: For a good digest of this issue see "Are We Teaching Children to Read Too Early?," Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.
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You are preparing them to write code: Having raised two children, I couldn't agree more with Morgan when he adds:
But you are not only teaching them that. You're teaching them the world is full of interesting things to discover. You're showing them how to be passionate and look for that ephemeral sense of quality in everything they do. The best part is that even if they don't become coders—most shouldn't and won't—the same skills can be used in nearly any career, in every hobby, in every life. When we force kids to learn syntax, we reinforce the idea that if something is not a blatantly employable skill, it's not valuable.
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many Silicon Valley tech parents . . . treat code, screens, technology in general with utmost caution: "Silicon Valley parents banning tech for their kids", BBC News, 5 June 2019; "Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free - and it should be a red flag," Business Insider, Feb 18, 2018; "Tablets out, imagination in: the schools that shun technology," The Guardian, 2 December, 2015.
Right now [computer science is] thought of . . . as basically vocational training with Java: When I studied philosophy just before the digital revolution imposed its hard fork on the world, the first two semesters contained a mandatory module on Boolean logic. Many of my classmates thought they'd signed up for a humanities degree and were outraged to be force-fed algebra: no matter, they had to pass the module or they couldn't continue with the degree. In this way minds were sharpened and broadened. I have a dream that computer science departments mandate an introductory module on the novels of Dostoyevsky, with the same conditions attached as for logic in philosophy. Anyone who (for whatever neurologic reasons) can't or can't be expected to complete such a course is offered an alternative and sent on a different programming track (perhaps specializing in debugging, for instance.) And when this is found to produce better, more thoughtful and collaborative coders; to halt the leach of good people from open source, then business schools adopt the same model, fostering empathy and ethical sense among their students. Some students complain, while others express delight, but any blowback is recognized as a small price to pay for the survival of humankind. Would-be open source contributors are given the additional pleasure of reading Congratulations, By the Way, George Saunders' short commencement speech to students at Syracuse University, which makes them laugh and helps them be better teammates, while imparting most of what they need to know to live a fulfilled and connected life. In the director's cut of this fantasy, literature students are also introduced to a programming language, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Bad poetry never destroyed a life but bad code can. And does.
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NASA announced that its next generation of Mars Rovers would run open source software: "NASA's next lunar rover will run open-source software," MIT Technology Review, April 12, 2021; "Meet the Open-Source Software Powering NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter," NASA Mars Exploration Program website.
a basic training certificate in collaborative communication: The open source community may need to introduce an educational process or basic certificate of qualification for new participants, setting out what will be expected and allowing would-be contributors to learn and demonstrate an ability to communicate constructively. Individuals to whom this presents a special challenge could be offered extra help or mentoring. For most of the time I've been writing this book, Nicholas has been designing a training program modeled on the grade-based system used in classical music teaching. One of the CodeGrades innovations closest to his heart is training in productive collaboration with others.
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Psychologists say humans are springloaded to linger on negatives because focus on danger keeps us safe: "Our Brain's Negative Bias: Why our brains are more highly attuned to negative news," Psychology Today, June 20, 2003.
Uber's criminality and cant exceeded even the direst imaginings of critics: See "The Uber whistleblower: I'm exposing a system that sold people a lie,'" The Guardian, 11 July 2022.
AI pricing algorithms are learning to collude: MIT Technology Review podcast, October 27, 2021, "How Pricing Algorithms Learn to Collude: AI could learn to form cartels in an effort to maximize profits."
TikTok algorithms bombard young men with misogynistic posts: "How TikTok bombards young men with misogynistic videos," The Guardian, 6 August, 2022.
the Chinese government using its equivalent of Microsoft 365 to censor books before they've even left their authors' laptops: "A million-word novel got censored before it was even shared. Now Chinese users want answers." MIT Technology Review, July 15, 2022.
an ambitious French plan to democratize Large Language Model "AI": "Inside a radical new project to democratize AI," MIT Technology Review, July 12, 2022.
a virtual reality program called "Isness-D": "VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence," MIT Technology Review, August 8, 2022; "Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit," MIT Technology Review, August 10, 2022.
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a Machine Learning-propelled medical revolution in diagnosis, treatment and drug design: See "The next healthcare revolution will have AI at its center," TechCrunch, September 20, 2021; "Rewriting what we thought was possible in biotech," MIT Technology Review, June 28, 2022; "Exclusive: NHS to use AI to identify people at higher risk of hepatitis C," Nursing in Practice, 3 August, 2022. Not everyone buys this enthusiasm, though, as detailed in "The skeptic: What precision medicine revolution?: The benefits of genomic drugs are exaggerated, hurting patients and the practice of medicine, says one high-profile oncologist," MIT Technology Review, October 23, 2018 and "Medicine's Machine Learning Problem: As Big Data tools reshape health care, biased datasets and unaccountable algorithms threaten to further disempower patients," Boston Review, January 4, 2021.
the conservative political analyst and academic Yuval Levin has opened a discussion on what to do about it: "It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here's What to Do Now," New York Times, August 5, 2022.
Big Tech companies who recognize their power and try to use it well, like Slack and Salesforce: Nuanced (and not uncritical) discussions of their success in this regard at: "What It's Like to Work at Slack", Candor, 2020, and "The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff: The Salesforce founder has donated a fortune to right capitalism's wrongs, and he thinks his fellow billionaires should too. Why can't we just be grateful?," Wired, December 11, 2019.