Will smart technologies solve all of our social problems,? Do we really have an app for that ?

 there was much talk of Artificial intelligence and how computers are going to replace doctors  whenI was in Medical school 3 decades ago.
Now we keep hearing and seeing the same old wine in a new bottles  

"In a time of growing conviction, in certain circles, that smart technologies will solve all of our social problems, it’s important to acknowledge that technology, including diagnostic and therapeutic innovations, can help us solve many health problems, but only if we remember the importance of using it fairly and wisely and compassionately. "

"TED Conferences—that Woodstock of the intellectual effete"

as the geeks would say, given enough apps, all of humanity’s bugs are shallow.

It would go something like this: Humanity, equipped with powerful self-tracking devices, finally conquers obesity, insomnia, and global warming as everyone eats less, sleeps better, and emits more appropriately. 

“Ebola has spread because of poor healthcare institutions—no staff, no space, and no stuff.”

"Politics, finally under the constant and far-reaching gaze of the electorate, is freed from all the sleazy corruption, backroom deals, and inefficient horse trading. Parties are disaggregated and replaced by Groupon-like political campaigns, where users come together—once—to weigh in on issues of direct and immediate relevance to their lives, only to disband shortly afterward. Now that every word—nay, sound—ever uttered by politicians is recorded and stored for posterity, hypocrisy has become obsolete as well. Lobbyists of all stripes have gone extinct as the wealth of data about politicians—their schedules, lunch menus, travel expenses—are posted online for everyone to review."

The edgiest cultural publications even employ algorithms to write criticism of songs composed by other algorithms. But not all has changed: just like today, the system still needs imperfect humans to generate the clicks to suck the cash from advertisers.

 These, after all, are the same people who are planning to scan all the world’s books and mine asteroids. Ten years ago, both ideas would have seemed completely crazy; today, only one of them does. ( What  I like and  do not like about google books in another  blog )

Perhaps it won’t overthrow the North Korean regime with tweets, but it could still accomplish a lot. 

Silicon Valley’s quest to fit us all into a digital straightjacket by promoting efficiency, transparency, certitude, and perfection—and, by extension, eliminating their evil twins of friction, opacity, ambiguity, and imperfection—will prove to be prohibitively expensive in the long run.

Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder, and the opportunity to err, to sin, to do the wrong thing: all of these are constitutive of human freedom

and, most terrifyingly, with a perfectly controlled social environment that would make dissent not just impossible but possibly even unthinkable

( This was a question  I posed  to  an  Indian  engineer who developed a chip to facilitate  gigabit  routers, Isn't  concentrating all the ability to control  information  in  fewer and  fewer  hands actually bad for freedom of the internet ?

throwing away the garbage would forever remain an exception—one unassailable bastion of individuality to resist Zuckerberg’s tyranny of the social.

By training local residents to effectively treat illnesses, the face of medicine may be forever changed

Efficiency can be useful but so can inefficiency: if everything were efficient,why would anyone bother to innovate? (exactly what all the  ODISHAvasis thought after building the temple for sun at konark) 

 soon, we’ll have mirrors that, thanks to their ability to tap into our “social graph,” will nudge us to lose weight because we look pudgier than most of our Facebook friends.