Why Big Tech Is Incompatible with Democracy | Bruno Giussani | TED

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by semaayildizz

How many algorithms are part of your

daily life?

How many sensors? How many screens? In

fact, interacting with screens and other

digital interfaces has become the main

daily activity of almost all of us.

But how many of those interactions are

actually really of our choosing?

Our lives and our societies are

increasingly structured around and by

algorithms and digital networks. And

this algorithmization of life, I think, is

a problem for different reasons. And I

want to touch upon two of them

tonight.

The first one is the nature of these

technologies. We think they are products

and we buy them, and once we own them, we

can do with them as we please. But in

the last couple of decades,

digital technologies have actually

become platforms,

invisible digital architectures within

which we live, and that changes

absolutely everything.

Almost all important software and

digital services. Think of office and

industrial applications,

information and entertainment feeds,

payments, artificial intelligence,

chatbots, they all now run on the cloud,

as we say, which means that the data and

the processing

are not in our machines controlled by us

locally, but they are on distant

machines on remote servers to which we

buy access and which are controlled by

the providers,

and that gives them an immense power