For all their good intentions, accidents happen when fallible humans intervene in complex systems they don't understand, says Flinders ...
ADELAIDE: Back in the 1990s – a lifetime ago in internet terms – the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells published several books charting the rise of information networks.
But over the past two decades, a fundamentally new business model emerged which even Castells had not foreseen – one in which attracting users onto digital platforms takes precedence over everything else, including what the user might say, do, or buy on that platform.Gathering information became the dominant imperative for tech giants – aided willingly by users charmed first by novelty, then by the convenience and self-expression afforded by being online.
Think not just of Google’s search tool, but also of the way Google and Amazon dominate cloud computing - the largely invisible systems that make the internet usable. And if the output satisfies the task at hand, the inner workings of the system are considered of minor importance. Even if this effort had been founded with the best of intentions, accidents abound when fallible humans intervene in complex systems with fledgling ethical and legal underpinnings.
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