I n 2013 a Silicon Valley software engineer decided that food is an inconvenience—a pain point in a busy life. Buying food, preparing it, and cleaning up afterwards struck him as an inefficient way to feed himself. And so was born the idea of Soylent, Rob Rhinehart’s meal replacement powder

Soylent may optimize meeting one’s daily nutritional needs with minimal cost and time investment. But for most people, food is not just a delivery mechanism for one’s nutritional requirements. It brings gustatory pleasure. It provides for social connection. It sustains and transmits cultural identity. A world in which Soylent spells the end of food also spells the degradation of these values.

That mindset is inculcated early in the training of technologists. When developing an algorithm, computer science courses often define the goal as providing an optimal solution to a computationally-specified problem. And when you look at the world through this mindset, it’s not just computational inefficiencies that annoy. Eventually, it becomes a defining orientation to life as well. As one of our colleagues at Stanford tells students, everything in life is an optimization problem.

The problem here is that goals such as connecting people, increasing human flourishing, or promoting freedom, equality, and democracy are not goals that are computationally tractable. Technologists are always on the lookout for quantifiable metrics. Measurable inputs to a model are their lifeblood, and the need to quantify produces a bias toward measuring things that are easy to quantify.

The bottom line is that technology is an explicit amplifier . It requires us to be explicit about the values we want to promote and how we trade-off between them, because those values are encoded in some way into the objective functions that are optimized. And it is an amplifier because it can often allow for the execution of a policy far more efficiently than humans. For example, with current technology we could produce vehicles that automatically issue speeding tickets whenever the driver exceeded the speed limit

Big Tech's focus on optimization and increasing efficiency is not inherently a good thing. What values should we pursue instead?

remotework

Remote Work

sciencefiction

Science Fiction

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

humanresources

Human Resources

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Why Silicon Valley's Optimization Mindset Sets Us Up for Failure

Smart lighting, smart windows, smart everything. My favorite music and pictures play automatically.Every moment of my daily life is made custom thanks to connected furniture.&nbsp;No road accidents : cars are autonomous.Almost everything can be quantified and predicted with analytics.

Life in 2030

"In the future, Light Field Displays may eliminate the need for a headset or display altogether, projecting 4D images directly onto your retinas from a point of focus."

No more screens or bulky headsets

It'll be both cheap and easy to edit genes, leading the way to tailor made pets and kids."Criminality and human trafficking will take on a new dimension of insidiousness when genetic identity no longer can be confirmed."

CRISPR technology

We'll be able to create matter from cells and bacteria. Death-free steak, anyone?

Biofacturing

Ads are going to be always more insidious, immersive and unskippable.

An advertisement hell

Driverless cars, smart homes and genetically engineered pets. Here's how tech is about to change your daily life.

5 predictions for what life will be like in 2030

Our immune systems need interactions with good bacteria to work, which partly lies on physically meeting people and touching them.&nbsp;Our current obsessions with avoiding physicial encounters with germs are not only slaying off "bad" bacteria, they're also massively killing the ones that are good for us.In the long run, we may even make some really important microbes go extinct.It's still a hypothesis, though. As long as doubt remains, we should all keep on washing our hands, putting on these pesky masks, and, yeah, also eating a healthy diet and doing exercise!

A controversial hypothesis : is social distancing killing us ?

The health of our bodies and microbiomes may depend on society’s return to lifestyles that expose us to bacteria, despite the risks.

travel

Travel

The New York Times: Digital and Home Delivery Subscriptions

You're not always either depressed or fine. Sometimes you're just in the middle, and that's what is called languishing.It's a state where you're just meh. You're not really suffering, but you're not exactly fired up either.That state might lead to further mental health issues. Hence, it should be acknowledged.The best way to counter it is to get ingrossed in something, whether it's playing a game, improving a skill or simply watching a movie.

Our common understanding of mental health is a caricature

The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.

mentalhealth

Mental Health

There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing

It's a story told by the blue-light-blocking glasses sellers that doesn't rely on hard evidence.And no, looking at screens will probably not make you go blind either.The only real issue here is eyestrain, which can happen in all kinds of situations, starting with driving.Easy hack to avoid that :"Every 20 minutes, take a 20-second break to look at something 20 feet away."

Forget about the Big Bad Blue Light myth

We spend a lot of time staring at screens. There’s the small screen in our pocket, the big screen we watch our shows on, and the medium screen that many of us stare into for eight hours a day to help pay for those other screens. Are all of these screens ruining our eyes?

health

Health

What Happens to Your Eyes When You Stare at Screens All Day

It's ok not to seek grand mastery goals.Try instead focusing more on the quality of your present experience.Get free of the anxiety of quantifying your results!

It's ok to be an amateur.

When I rekindled my relationship with the piano and tapped into my inner amateur, I discovered a quiet room of my own

Why Silicon Valley's Optimization Mindset Sets Us Up for Failure

5 predictions for what life will be like in 2030

The New York Times: Digital and Home Delivery Subscriptions

There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing

What Happens to Your Eyes When You Stare at Screens All Day

Iris Nishimoto