Exponential growth can hide many errors and spin-offs that grow slowly then explode
Amin Karbasi @aminkarbasi This might be true, but so is any phenomenon with an exponential growth. Almost until the very end, everything looks fine.
Replying to @aminkarbasi @stanfordnlp and 2 others
The rapid growth might go on for years, but take decades to show “this was a really bad idea that causes huge inequities in the world that hurts billions”. Google started in 1998, but it is clear now that allowing commercial firms to be global arbiters of what gets shown on the Internet, without effective oversight, is not in the best interests of the 8.1 Billion humans now. And it need not be “evil intent” but simply inadequate systems where about 180,000 humans at Google are simply doing many things based on their own memories, feeling and personal situations, with little or no oversight from the billions affected.
It is common to find millions or billions affected negatively – from hidden decisions and unmonitored choices and assumptions in large corporations and agencies. If you treat corporations as “organizational information systems implemented with mostly human memories and humans in every process”, those kinds of systems, when there are many humans, often fail from communication errors, indecision, lack of verification and oversight. And, at whole corporation affecting the world level, every organization on the Internet is much less than it could be, and more often much less than it ought.
23 Jun 2024 is the 26th Anniversary of the Internet Foundation. It is older than Google but many months.
Filed as (Exponential growth can hide many errors and spin-offs that grow slowly then exponentiate)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
