Nearly 350 years ago Adam Smith wrote, approvingly, of the value of specialization in producing prosperity in his anecdote about manufacturing pins. I thought about that when I read this opinion piece at the Guardian about the world being created by the “technological elite”:
One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?†angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.
Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.
Now there’s an easy solution to the problems created by the power of the Googles and Facebooks: decide that your data belongs to you, e.g. that data about your browsing behavior does not belong to those who capture it but to you. Analysis of that data abstracted from you could reasonably belong to those who performed the analysis but not the data.
Much harder to solve is the problem of granting power to individuals with narrowing ranges of specialized knowledge. Perhaps we need a new Adam Smith to counter the original by writing an anecdote on the manufacture of pinheads.
