Books > Computing & IT
|
Buy Now
Meganets - How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R656
Discovery Miles 6 560
You Save: R105
(14%)
|
|
Meganets - How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 9 - 17 working days
|
How the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives - as
uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics - are
transforming life, society, culture, and politics. David Auerbach's
exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet
begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the
tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence
our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon,
Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse
encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government
systems such as China's Social Credit System and India's Aadhaar.
As we increasingly integrate our society, culture and politics
within a hyper-networked fabric, Auerbach explains how the
interactions of billions of people with unfathomably large online
networks have produced a new sort of beast: ever-changing systems
that operate beyond the control of the individuals, companies, and
governments that created them. Meganets, Auerbach explains, have a
life of their own, actively resisting attempts to control them as
they accumulate data and produce spontaneous, unexpected social
groups and uprisings that could not have even existed twenty years
ago. And they constantly modify themselves in response to user
behavior, resulting in collectively authored algorithms none of us
intend or control. These enormous invisible organisms exerting
great force on our lives are the new minds of the world,
increasingly commandeering our daily lives and inner realities.
Auerbach's analysis of these gargantuan opaque digital forces yield
important insights such as: - The conventional wisdom that the
Googles and Facebook of this world are tightly run algorithmic
entities is a myth. No one is really in control. - The efforts at
reform - to get lies and misinformation off meganets - run into a
brick wall because the companies and executives who run them are
trapped by the persistent, evolving, and opaque systems they have
created. - Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are uncontrollable
and their embrace by elite financial institutions threatens the
entire economy - We are asking the wrong questions in assuming that
if only the Facebooks of this world could be better regulated or
broken up that they would be better, more ethical citizens - Why
questions such as making algorithms fair and bias-free and whether
AI can be a tool for good or evil are wrong and misinformed
Auerbach then comes full circle, showing that while we cannot
ultimately control meganets we can tame them through the
counterintuitive measures he describes in detail.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
Oracle 12c - SQL
Joan Casteel
Paperback
(1)
R1,406
R1,302
Discovery Miles 13 020
MIS
Hossein Bidgoli
Paperback
R1,220
R1,140
Discovery Miles 11 400
See more
|