Tech’s Epithet: “Enabled By Default”
If anyone endeavors to write a book about what went wrong with tech, I have a great suggestion for the title:
“Enabled by Default”
It seems there really are two hard problems in tech:
- Naming things
- Setting good defaults
- Keeping to scope
Anyhow, a little while later I found this Hacker News comment (courtesy of Terence Eden) where one user declared: “I'm glad for an AI to record everything of me and help me get better / substitute me”. Another responded:
Then you are free to consent to that. You are not permitted, on the other hand, to presume that consent from every other person on the planet which is what these companies have done and continue doing.
That's it. Just ask. Just asking the damn question solves 99% of the ethical issues people raise about this tech, ask, and it's done. But they won't, because they know damn well a whole lot of people are going to say no. Far too many for it to be viable tech.
The comparison they go on to make to the world of scientific research is interesting.
Imagine, for example, participating in a medical study without even knowing! Your personal information scraped, analyzed, reported on, and sold to behemoth or burgeoning pharmaceutical companies for their profit. And what about your consent? It’s assumed by default. Explicit opt-out is required.
The imbalance is striking: companies hold more control over the power dynamics of consent than individuals.
To be honest, it would all make for a good dystopian sci-fi film. Plot line: a small movement gains power, then becomes authoritarian. Leaders promise their fledgling subjects an option to “opt-out” of their imposed way of life is “coming soon” — but it never materializes. 2,000 years later, the party continues to promise “opt-out” as an imminent option even though nobody believes it anymore. They also don’t object to the clear falsity of the statement.
My working title: “Resistance Opt-out is Futile”.