System Error is a triumph: an analysis of the critical challenges facing our digital society
that is as accessible as it is sophisticated. ? Anne-Marie Slaughter CEO of New America A
forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors?experts who have worked at ground
zero of the tech revolution for decades?which reveals how big tech's obsession with
optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can
take to change course renew our democracy and save ourselves. In no more than the blink of an
eye a naïve optimism about technology's liberating potential has given way to a dystopian
obsession with biased algorithms surveillance capitalism and job-displacing robots. Yet too
few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply
accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists the venture capitalists who
fund them and the politicians who give them free rein. It doesn't need to be this way. System
Error exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech's relentless focus on
optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination erodes privacy displaces
workers and pollutes the information we get. This optimization mindset substitutes what
companies care about for the values that we as a democratic society might choose to prioritize.
Well-intentioned optimizers fail to measure all that is meaningful and when their creative
disruptions achieve great scale they impose their values upon the rest of us. Armed with an
understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power three Stanford professors?a
philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics a political scientist who served
under Obama and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also
an early Google engineer)?reveal how we can hold that power to account. Troubled by the values
that permeate the university's student body and its culture they worked together to chart a
new path forward creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow's technologists approach
their profession. Now as the dominance of big tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum
they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what
is happening what is at stake and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it
control us.
