Aufgabe NT 3 - Aufgabe 3.2 · Abitur NRW Englisch LK · Nachtermin 2021

Klausurteil A

Rose Eveleth

The biggest lie tech people tell themselves – and the rest of us

Imagine you’re taking an online business class – the kind where you watch video lectures

and then answer questions at the end. But this isn’t a normal class, and you’re not just watching

the lectures: They’re watching you back. Every time the facial recognition system decides

that you look bored, distracted, or tuned out, it makes a note. And after each lecture, it only

5 asks you about content from those moments.

This isn’t a hypothetical system; it’s a real one deployed by a company called Nestor. And

if you don’t like the sound of it, you’re not alone. Neither do the actual students.

When I asked the man behind the system, French inventor Marcel Saucet, how the students

in these classes feel about being watched, he admitted that they didn’t like it. They felt violated

10 and surveilled, he said, but he shrugged off any implication that it was his fault. “Everybody

is doing this,” he told me. “It’s really early and shocking, but we cannot go against natural

laws of evolution.”

As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line

as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their

15 own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than

any individual inventor or CEO. They say they are simply caught in a tide, swept along in a

current they cannot fight. They say it inevitably leads them to facial recognition (now even

being deployed on children), smart speakers that record your intimate conversations, and

doorbells that narc on your neighbors. They say we can’t blame these companies for the

20 erosion of privacy or democracy or trust in public institutions. […]

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation.

Evolution is driven by random mutation – mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions

may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market

those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment,

25 the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t

spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

In some situations, even if we can’t literally put a technological genie back in a bottle, we

can artificially intervene to make sure the genie plays by specific rules.

There are clear laws about what companies can and can’t do in the realm of biological weapons.

30 The FDA ensures drugs are tested for efficacy and safety before they can be sold. The USDA

ensures new food research is done with care. We don’t let anybody frack or drill for oil or

build nuclear power plants wherever they like. We don’t let just anybody make and sell cars

or airplanes or guns.

So the assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the

35 public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other

industry. They’re not.

In many ways, the American tech mogul blaming some invisible arc of innovation for his

choices is simply an echo of the very ethos that founded America: progress at all costs. The

men and women who colonized America largely saw progress as a march, a continual straight

40 path, forward at all times, never to be questioned or slowed. Benjamin Franklin (himself an

inventor) once wrote: “The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting

sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be

carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.”

So to suggest a slowing – or perhaps even (god forbid) a reverse – seems antithetical to the

45 fabric of America. When former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski says, “What already

happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they

made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow,” he is echoing the sentiments of our

nation’s founders.

“These arguments for corporate supremacy and technological progress are so deeply connected

50 in the American mind,” says Luke Stark, a researcher who studies behavior and computing

at Microsoft Research Montreal. “It’s really tied to the whole American manifest destiny and

the broader history of American settler colonialism.” The attitude is that we must march on,

forward, westward, no matter what stands in our way. Going back is simply not an option.

Even those afraid of all-seeing corporations argue that instead of pressing pause, we, the

55 consumers, must simply move forward more quickly. “What I try to focus on is not to try to

stop the march of technological progress,” Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and the author of

Sapiens, told Time magazine. “Instead, I try to run faster.”

This endless, punishing race in the name of “progress” is often what drives consumer

behavior, too. Despite the “American dream” – security, safety, prosperity – being more

60 and more out of reach for everyday Americans, the idea that it’s just around the corner drives

people to purchase these products.

If you have the newest app, people think their lives will be easier, you’ll have more free time,

more quality time. Commercials promise more backyard barbecues under sparklers and

birthday surprise parties facilitated by internet-connected light bulbs.

65 And when we buy the products, tech companies take that as a green light to continue on

their “inevitable” path. […]

And so we’re left with a tech world claiming to be driven by our desires when those

decisions aren’t ones that most consumers feel good about. There’s a growing chasm

between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies

70 decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind.

We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the

“natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question

what “progress” actually means.

Annotations:

6 · Nestor – French tech company

19 · to narc on – informal: to spy on someone

25 · to do focus groups – to interview a select group of people on a product before it is launched

30 · FDA – Food and Drug Administration

30 · USDA – U.S. Department of Agriculture

45 · Uber – American tech company

57 · Sapiens – Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind: non-fiction book published in 2014

3.2 After reading Rose Eveleth's article, you have begun to wonder what progress actually means and what part technology plays in it. Write a letter to the editor in which you reflect on her view and also put forward your own thoughts.

(Evaluation: re-creation of text) (14 Punkte)