Course content
Big Tech is running the world. Google, Facebook, Amazon are among the
most powerful companies on the planet. They have amassed this power through
astonishing technological innovation and productivity -- with search,
social networking, and online shopping, these companies have re-woven
the very fabric of everyday life. As a result, we can now access
information, communicate, and access consumer goods in ways that would
have been almost inconceivable just a few years ago. Incredibly,
digital access to this bounty is available essentially for free,
across the entire world.
But there's a problem. The course is about exactly what the problem is
with big tech -- and more importantly, how to fix it. Overshadowing all this
development is one particular technology, namely Artificial Intelligence, which
has exploded in public consciousness with the emergence of generative AI.
Many believe that AI is now poised to usher in a kind of utopia with unprecedented improvements in productivity and general living standards. We will examine
this vision of AI, looking at its history, how it works today, and where it is
likely to take us. Ultimately, the promise of AI is to unlock the inner workings
of the human mind -- we are still pretty far from that goal. But in
the meantime, Big Tech is busy applying AI to actual human minds
across the globe. The Internet has become a vast, unprecedented
psychology experiment being performed on billions of unwitting subjects.
In this course, we seek concrete, practical solutions to the social problems posed by Big Tech, in the age of AI. These solutions can't be simply walking away from our
technology. In fact, in large part the solution lies within the technology itself, and
we will see in this course that parts of the solution have been in plain sight all along. Jaron Lanier argues that the solution lies in the humanistic digital economy already envisioned in the 1960's in the work of Ted Nelson, involving technical
mechanisms such as micropayments, and two-way links that empower
individuals and protect the integrity of content.
See course description in course catalogue