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March 21, 2021 11:07 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VSi0LoscuSw/are-tech-companies-squandering-the-good-of-all-for-extractive-behaviors
Are Tech Companies Squandering 'the Good of All' for Extractive Behaviors?
"If I worked in tech antitrust policy, I would really want to understand why all the cases against Microsoft 20 years ago were such an unqualified failure." That's what venture capitalist Benedict Evans (formerly an Andreessen Horowitz partner), is asking regulators on Twitter. "You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?" Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the thread of reminiscent reactions from Microsoft employees prompted this response on the blog of software developer Dave Winer "to lament the collateral damage of a winner-take-all mentality.""Microsoft could've played a senior role, and helped the rest of us add all kinds of editors and databases to the web, and at least try to bring across some of the GUI innovations of the 1980s. Instead all that was lost. Today, decades later, because of the chaos Microsoft brought us then, the editors on the web still suck. They are really inferior. Far less useful than the editors we had before the web. "What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children." But are we facing the same issues today? In The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?, geek publishing icon/seed investor Tim O'Reilly checks in on tech's latter-day missed opportunities:The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits"... It's a sad time for Silicon Valley, because we are seeing not only the death of its youthful idealism but a missed opportunity. Paul Cohen, the former DARPA program manager for AI, made a powerful statement a few years ago at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences that we both attended: "The opportunity of AI is to help humans model and manage complex interacting systems." That statement sums up so much of the potential that is squandered when firms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook fall prey to the Friedman doctrine rather than setting more ambitious goals for their algorithms. I'm not talking about future breakthroughs in AI so much as I'm talking about the fundamental advances in market coordination that the internet gatekeepers have demonstrated. These powers can be used to better model and manage complex interacting systems for the good of all. Too often, though, they have been made subservient to the old extractive paradigm."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VSi0LoscuSw/are-tech-companies-squandering-the-good-of-all-for-extractive-behaviors
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