Re-Engineering Humanity by Brett Frischmann (PDF)

Description

Selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2018. Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that’s increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what’s happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. Check out the Interview and Excerpt published by The Economist: economist.com/open-future/2018/10/24/is-technology-re-engineering-humanity

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review ONE OF THEGUARDIAN’S BEST BOOKS OF 2018 “The various ways in which the new capitalism is exploiting and manipulating the world’s human resources are brilliantly outlined by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in Re-engineering Humanity” John Naughton, The Guardian Best Books of 2018 “A magnificent achievement. Writing in the tradition of Neil Postman, Jacque Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, this book is the decade’s deepest and most powerful portrayal of the challenges to freedom created by our full embrace of comprehensive techno-social engineering. A rewarding and stimulating book that merits repeated readings and may also cause you to reconsider how you live life.”Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, and author of The Attention Merchants”Everybody is suddenly worried about technology. Will social media be the end of democracy? Is automation going to eliminate jobs?Will artificial intelligence make people obsolete? Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger boldly propose that the problem isn’t the rise of ‘smart’ machines but the dumbing down of humanity.” Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Control in the Digital Age”Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger cogently argue that our Fitbit, Echo, Android, and game console, our Facebook pages, Google searches, Amazon and Netflix profiles, give far less than they take…. All of us should read it and decide, deliberately, if this is a future we want for ourselves and our children.” Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech, and author of Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life”Frischmann and Selinger deftly and convincingly show why we should be less scared of robots than of becoming more robotic, ourselves.This book will convince you why it’s so important we embed technologies with human values before they embed us with their own.” Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus”Re-Engineering Humanity brings a pragmatic if somewhat dystopic perspective to the technological phenomena of our age. Humans are learning machines and we learn from our experiences. This book made me ask myself whether the experiences we are providing to our societies are in fact beneficial in the long run.”Vint Cerf, Co-Inventor of the Internet”Frischmann and Selinger provide a thoroughgoing and balanced examination of the tradeoffs inherent in offloading tasks and decisions to computers. By illuminating these often intricate and hidden tradeoffs, and providing a practical framework for assessing and negotiating them, the authors give us the power to make wiser choices.”Nicolas Carr, author of The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us, from the Foreword”Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger have written Re-Engineering Humanity as a sustained and multifaceted critique of how contemporary trends in internet technology are slowly but surely shrinking the territory of human autonomy. Their work is a warning, as well as a description, of how internet technologies that ostensibly make our lives easier do so by taking control of our lives away from our self-conscious decision-making.”​ – Adam Riggio, Royal Crown College, Social Epistemology Reviewand Reply Collective (social-epistemology.com) “In our own time, as Frischmann and Selinger observe, the ‘smart’ device and ‘internet of things’ developers who offer us efficiency then pull a bait-and-switch: instead of sending us on our way to use our newly-free time on art, beauty, and education, they channel us into putting our time into mumblety-Facebook and its ilk, or what the authors aptly call ‘cheap bliss’.”Lara Freidenfelds, Nursing Clio (nursingclio.org)”In Re-engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger have dug deeply into what’s going on behind the ‘cheap bliss’ in our fully connected world.’ Doc Searls, Linux Journal’… a recent startling and thoughtful book …[Re-Engineering Humanity] is an exploration of how everyday practices – such as clicking to accept an app’s legal terms – are made so simple that we are effectively ‘trained’ to not read the contents. Unless things change, the dominance of digital technology means that, over time, humans will lose their capacity for judgment, discrimination and self-sufficiency.’ John Naughton, The Guardian “This is an incredible work that should be studied by every thinking human. It captures details on threats, documenting the many warnings we are already seeing.” Bob Gourley, CTO Vision (ctovision.com)”We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our toolsshape us.” This truism–by the media-scholar John Culkin about the workof Marshall McLuhan–is more potent than ever in the age of data andalgorithms. The technology is having a profound effect on how peoplelive and think. Some of those changes are documented in”Re-Engineering Humanity” by two technology thinkers from differentacademic backgrounds: Brett Frischmann is a law professor … and Evan Selinger teaches philosophy …. Together, they explore how ordinary activities like clicking on anapp’s legal terms are made so simple that it “trains” us to not read the contents. Over time, the authors fear that humans will lose theircapacity for judgment, discrimination and self-sufficiency. … The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked Mr Frischmann five questions about thesedyspeptic themes. A lightly-condensed excerpt from the book, onTaylorism and its relevance to the algorithmic economy today, appearsafter his answers. — The Economist, economist.com/open-future/2018/10/24/is-technology-re-engineering-humanity”The various ways in which the new capitalism is exploiting and manipulating the world’s human resources are brilliantly outlined by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in Re-engineering Humanity (Cambridge University Press).” — John Naughton, The Guardian, The Observer Best Books of 2018 Book Description Innovation has a dark side. The price of progress is that humans are becoming increasingly predictable, programmable, and machine-like. About the Author Brett Frischmann is The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, at Villanova University. He is also an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino. He has published foundational books on the relationships between infrastructural resources, governance, commons, and spillovers, including Governing Medical Knowledge Commons, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Governing Knowledge Commons, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg (2014); and Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (2012). Evan Selinger is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is also the Head of Research Communications, Community, and Ethics at the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction, and Creativity. A Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum, his primary research is on the ethical and privacy dimensions of emerging technology. Selinger has co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy, with Jules Polontesky and Omer Tene (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018). A strong advocate of public philosophy, he regularly writes for magazines, newspapers, and blogs, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, Slate, and Wired. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Amazing book, but be warned!What is it that all book reviews say, “a must read”… well as much as I hate to use a cliché I feel I have to in this case. Re-Engineering Humanity is truly a must read if you are at all interested in the techno-social conversation. For me, it was a completely unique take on the effects of technology and, more importantly, what we should actually be worried about. It seems almost everything I’ve read up until this has had a focus on how society is being changed by technologies and/or how that will impact people, in those more pluralistic broader strokes. What Frischmann and Selinger have artfully done is put our individual humanity at the center of the conversation, and for me that was both original and fascinating! As you might suspect, it will make you think first about the impact of technology on your humanity and then, by necessity, you will be forced to consider what are the very pieces that comprise your humanity and which ones would you be willing to give up in the name of convenience.But now the warning… this was not an easy read, well at least not for me. On more than one occasion and I had to stop, scratch my head, say what the heck and then re-read the passage. Re-engineering Humanity will definitely require your focus and attention, but trust me, well worth your time and effort!

⭐I chose this to write a book review for publication in my University’s literary review publication. Overall, it was a great read and the topic is very relevant to today and is something I discuss already with friends. I recommend to others that are either concerned about technology and how we react to advances or for those who have never thought about it before.

⭐This well-researched and well-argued book takes a deep look at how technology is training us and our children to be automatons.

⭐Heavy with concepts and ideas

⭐”Thanks” for the book!

⭐This is one of the most powerful books I’ve read to date on the digital revolution. I read R.F. Georgy’s Notes from the Cafe, which offered a powerful indictment against the digital age. If Georgy succeeded in dissecting us in a fictional format, then Frischmann and Selinger offered us the scholarly justification for the gradual erosion of our humanity. I”m going to juxtapose two quotes, one from Georgy’s Notes from the Cafe, and another from Re-Engineering Humanity so readers can have an idea of what these scholars and intellectuals are trying to warn us about our technology-dependent world. “We seem to over inflate the epistemic value of information and confuse it for knowledge, and knowledge derived from information somehow passes off as wisdom.” – R.F. Georgy. ” We conclude the third part by critically considering the core normative question, To what end? Techno-social engineering cuts to the very heart of who we are as people and the kinds of worlds we want to live in.” – Frischmann & Selinger. The above quotes alone perfectly capture the engineered world we have created. Re-Engineering Humanity will go down in history as a seminal work in terms of our understanding of the engineered world we created.Both Re-Engineering Humanity, as well as Notes from the Cafe, must be made required reading at every university. I applaud Frischmann and Selinger for having the courage to dissect our world in such as a way as to render a broadly defined indictment against the belief that progress, as it is currently understood, is always a wonderful thing.If you care about reflection and contemplation, then I’m urging everyone to read Re-Engineering Humanity.

⭐This is one of the most ambitious books that I have read in a while. The good news is that it delivers. What links the book’s seemingly disparate discussions of fake news, surveillance in the schools, the existence of free will, net neutrality, online contracting, and the Internet of Things? Frischmann and Selinger convincingly make the case that these issues are all tied to the creep of “techno-social engineering.” Online architectures poke and prompt us to outsource some of the basic building blocks of our humanity–sociality, deliberative choice–without us realizing it. There are plenty of wonderful anecdotes in here to shock your friends, from the “quantified baby” movement to Amazon’s patent on “anticipatory shipping” to technologies that could even outsource control of our limbs to smart machines. Even better, the authors provide the critical thought necessary to grapple with how to weigh the consequences of these innovations. This is an extremely thoughtful take, not an anti-technology screed. The book will probably be most influential for its ingenious construction of a “reverse Turing test” that technologists and policymakers can use to recognize when smart technologies risk trading our humanity for the cheap pleasures and convenience of behaving like stimulus-response automaton. A must read for anyone who suspects that the growing ubiquity of smart machines is changing our lives, and not necessarily for the better.

⭐This book is fundamental for understanding how the digital revolution shapes our society and even impacts our nature of human beings. The focus on the conception of humanity (before all other – still relevant- aspects of our democratic societies and our lives, both increasingly “binarified”) is a key element of novelty.The book opens a new perspective in the current context of passive acceptance of technology in our life : in particular, I have found the two freedoms (freedom to be off, and freedom from technological determinism) a powerful concept for further works. In addition, I found extremely original the proposal of engineering or manually injecting transaction costs and inefficiencies when using digital technologie, in order to foster active exercise of human capabilities.

⭐Interesting and thought-provoking

⭐O livro traz reflexões profundas sobre o significado da autonomia em um contexto de constante digitalização, “nudges” comportamentais e domínio ubíquo das tecnologias da informação. Os autores defendem um conjunto de testes sobre a autonomia humana, com inspiração no Teste de Turing, para identificar quando o homem deixa de ser homem e passa a se comportar como simples máquina consumista na Internet.Por ser uma contribuição entre um jurista e um filósofo, o livro traz insights interessantes sobre a dinâmica contratual na Internet (os “boilerplaits”, contratos que ninguém lê) e a indução para que os dados sejam captados e tratados com a máxima capacidade de extração de valor, de forma invisível. Os autores defendem uma espécie de “novo ambientalismo” para contestar a redução e depredação de bens (imateriais) que são coletivos, como a privacidade e a proteção de dados pessoais. Há uma crítica profunda a uma análise economicista sobre a racionalidade de agentes econômicos no ambiente online.O livro traz conceitos importantes sobre “engenharização” do comportamento humano, trazendo à tona a política dos códigos e as escolhas e valores subjacentes a decisões sobre como determinadas tecnologias irão operar. O livro traz lições semelhantes às obras de Hannah Arendt e Hans Jonas sobre a condição humana na era tecnológica, porém com uma matriz filosófica mais anglo-saxônica do que europeia continental.

⭐

⭐If anyone is looking for the effects of social media on humanity this is the book for you. Excellent and thought provoking.

⭐O livro é essencial para compreender a complexidade da tecnologia na sociedade contemporânea.

⭐

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