Big Data or the curse of efficiency

Stan­dards are a way to reduce risks, improve effi­cien­cy and opti­mize key oper­a­tions. Com­pa­nies try­ing to cre­ate stand-alone solu­tions and monop­o­lies tend to rely increas­ing­ly on stan­dards, uni­ty, stream­lin­ing and com­pli­ance. Does Big Data help when it comes to assim­i­la­tion, stan­dard­i­s­a­tion, har­mon­i­sa­tion and egal­i­tar­i­an­ism and thus increas­ing efficiency?

Dr Cal­daro­la chats with jour­nal­ist Dr Hajo Schu­mach­er, author of the book “Kein Netz – wie wir unser wirk­lich­es Leben zurück­gewin­nen” , on the risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties of exces­sive stan­dard­i­s­a­tion in the dig­i­tal age.

As a result of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion many process­es were sim­pli­fied and par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed while tra­di­tion­al crafts and indi­vid­ual and tai­lor-made work became much less sig­nif­i­cant. In this way, prod­ucts could be sold more cheap­ly but still be of high­er qual­i­ty. Now we can observe a sim­i­lar devel­op­ment tak­ing place with dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion. A vari­ety of ser­vices are being stan­dard­ised by inter­act­ing with an app, a ques­tion­naire or a frame- thus show­ing us that here too automa­tion is pro­gress­ing. Machines are doing the work of humans in these areas as well while indi­vid­u­als claims and per­son­al con­sult­ing are becom­ing less impor­tant. Exam­ples for this trend are Legal­Tech, Fin­Tech, online orders, online mon­ey trans­fers etc. What does stan­dard­i­s­a­tion mean for us as indi­vid­u­als? Secu­ri­ty, cer­tain­ty in plan­ning, pre­dictabil­i­ty…? Sim­ply stat­ed, is there still a place for indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty, human inter­ac­tion, cus­tom-made prod­ucts and, final­ly, what about peo­ple them­selves or employees?

Dr Hajo Schu­mach­er: Here we can see var­i­ous types of log­ic com­ing togeth­er: On the one hand, we have the desire of the cus­tomer to be treat­ed as an indi­vid­ual togeth­er with a desire for cus­tom-made prod­ucts. That wish still exists – but it costs a lot of mon­ey, whether we are talk­ing about fur­ni­ture, trav­el, clothes or cars.

A com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent type of log­ic rules over low prices. In this regard, tech providers and cus­tomers as a group are fair­ly eye-to-eye on this one: It has to be cheap and con­ve­nient. Stan­dard­i­s­a­tion makes for bar­gains, even when prod­ucts have to be deliv­ered, as we have seen with Ama­zon and Lieferan­do, to name two examples.

Let us con­sid­er the finan­cial ser­vices provider who has been after me for months because s/he real­ly wants to invest my mon­ey for me. The the­o­ry is a sim­ple one: A soft­ware invests the mon­ey in funds which have been doing well. Anoth­er soft­ware fig­ures out what sort of investor I am. A per­son­al meet­ing is only con­sid­ered nec­es­sary if I as the cus­tomer am still hes­i­tant. And then the human touch would come into play: The abil­i­ty of the finan­cial con­sul­tant to charm and manip­u­late me and pos­si­bly per­suade me. These prop­er­ties are cost­ly, mean­ing an algo­rithm tells the com­pa­ny how many times it is worth try­ing before resort­ing to actu­al human intervention.

In this way, even the human fac­tor has become elec­tron­i­cal­ly quan­ti­fied. Both sides can thus enjoy the advan­tage of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion: The finan­cial insti­tu­tion in ques­tion has a high­er mar­gin because per­son­nel costs have been opti­mized while I as the cus­tomer pay low­er fees owing to robot­ic invest­ments and pos­si­bly low­er risks, as if the bank employ­ees had their eye on the commission.

But, unfor­tu­nate­ly, there are some very dif­fer­ent sto­ries. We know, for exam­ple, that in the US wait­ing times on cus­tomer hot­lines are being opti­mized by AI. This means that when I call a telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny in order to com­plain about an incor­rect bill, I will get the mes­sage that approx­i­mate­ly 34 cus­tomers are in front of me and I will have to wait at least a half an hour.

Is it real­ly like that? I have no idea but real­ly the point is fig­ur­ing out at what moment pre­cise­ly I will get tired of wait­ing and give up. At the same time, I will be told to have a look in the FAQ to see if the solu­tion to my prob­lem can be found there. Of course, it can’t. Com­pa­nies are real­ly inter­est­ed in hir­ing as lit­tle cus­tomer ser­vice per­son­nel as pos­si­ble because they cost a lot of money

AI is in a posi­tion to cal­cu­late when I will give up but, at the same time, knows where my per­son­al break­ing point is: When do I get so fed up that I swear on the life of my grand­moth­er that I will nev­er ever turn to that com­pa­ny again? Every per­son has their own indi­vid­ual break­ing point, but an algo­rithm can cal­cu­late when it will become rel­e­vant for the firm in ques­tion. It is nev­er about offer­ing the best cus­tomer ser­vice, but about receiv­ing the most accept­able yet worst ser­vice pos­si­ble. Real­ly, the main issue is about max­i­miz­ing prof­it. If you want to under­stand dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, you actu­al­ly only need to under­stand capitalism.

As part of many job appli­ca­tion process­es, a num­ber of appli­ca­tion por­tals and pre-con­fig­ured frames are being used when one wants to sub­mit one’s appli­ca­tion. But now per­son­al­i­ty pro­files of appli­cants are to be cre­at­ed with the help of AI by using short videos. If an appli­cant changes their out­fit from a blouse and a blaz­er to a t‑shirt, changes their hair­style, or takes their glass­es off, to name but a few exam­ples, then the results of the eval­u­a­tion of the can­di­date’s per­son­al­i­ty changes as well. Will indi­vid­u­al­ists or espe­cial­ly intel­li­gent peo­ple be over­looked? This would mean the very peo­ple need­ed for com­plete­ly auto­mat­ed process­es, dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and so on might not be hired. Are these sorts of process­es even com­pat­i­ble with our notion of human dignity?

Here is a counter-ques­tion: Are job inter­views ever com­pat­i­ble with human dig­ni­ty? Yuval Noah Harari says: Our dig­i­talised life is a life-long job inter­view. The fact that appli­ca­tion para­me­ters change with the clothes you wear mere­ly demon­strates how bad­ly soft­ware of this type is being pro­grammed and how pathet­ic the cri­te­ria of the poten­tial employ­er are. All the bias­es you can think of con­cern­ing men wear­ing suits and women wear­ing pearls seem to have been incor­po­rat­ed into these stan­dards. Have fun with that! Well, we can’t blame that on the tech­nol­o­gy but instead on the pro­gram­mers who all seem to suf­fer from the same bias prob­lems, regard­less of where they come from. This means that the soft­ware mere­ly reflects all the things that have been going wrong at the HR man­age­ment lev­el. If we believe in a high­er jus­tice, then all the com­pa­nies who use this type of soft­ware will get exact­ly the sort of employ­ees they deserve- which will hope­ful­ly become notice­able when it comes to the suc­cess of their business.

Why are employ­ers rely­ing on eval­u­a­tions gen­er­at­ed by machines, or rather soft­ware, and not on their own judge­ment? Is it a ques­tion of respon­si­bil­i­ty and, if it is, are we sac­ri­fic­ing our free­dom by giv­ing up/avoiding our responsibility?

First of all, I would con­tra­dict the the­sis that peo­ple have a big prob­lem giv­ing up their free­dom. Well, as long as we are talk­ing about showy lib­er­ties, like hav­ing two SUVs, going on three cruis­es and look­ing down on minori­ties with­out restraint, peo­ple fight for their sup­posed rights in these cas­es. But, at the very least by the time we look at free­dom of speech, there we see the lim­its to free­dom: First let’s can­cel cul­ture. As soon as respon­si­bil­i­ty comes into play or we need to fight for our con­vic­tions, then that usu­al­ly leaves most peo­ple by the way­side. Which brings us back to the orig­i­nal sub­ject. The sup­pos­ed­ly objec­tive nature of soft­ware is real­ly prac­ti­cal because the man­ag­er of per­son­nel can sim­ply give up all sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty and hand it over to tech­nol­o­gy. Ide­al­ly, we even mys­ti­fy the pro­gramme a lit­tle to make it ultra-objec­tive and supe­ri­or to peo­ple in every respect. Once this is done, I don’t have to answer for any of my deci­sions anymore.

In this regard, we are also expe­ri­enc­ing what we know con­cern­ing the polar oppo­sites: cheap ver­sus cus­tom-made. As soon as we are deal­ing with cost­ly expert staff, com­pa­nies are will­ing to hire expen­sive per­son­nel con­sul­tants. If, how­ev­er, we are talk­ing about mass jobs, which are eas­i­ly inter­change­able, a stan­dard­ised soft­ware will take over the whole selec­tion process, includ­ing all the red tape, meal tick­ets and invi­ta­tion to the Christ­mas par­ty. And why? Because it’s cheap.

Do we need an aver­age per­son for dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion to work or for dig­i­tal sys­tems to work? Or will a selec­tion process lead­ing to a cer­tain stan­dard take place owing to the greater reliance on dig­i­tal systems?

It prob­a­bly works the oth­er way round. Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion is cre­at­ing the aver­age per­son. AI might cal­cu­late that an air­plane pas­sen­ger is allowed to car­ry 2.43 kg of hand lug­gage, so that as much lug­gage as pos­si­ble has to be trans­port­ed at addi­tion­al cost. Peo­ple might then start weigh­ing their bags with a jeweller’s scale.

Some­times you can also observe rec­i­p­ro­cal effects if you look at Insta­gram pho­tos, for exam­ple: Peo­ple post motifs to receive as many likes as pos­si­ble. Then the soft­ware in ques­tion will tell me that food, sun­sets, and cars go down espe­cial­ly well. And what do you find on Insta­gram? Plates full of food, beach­es at sun­set and peo­ple in front of cars. Is there any­thing less orig­i­nal than that? Or activ­i­ty apps. Since some ran­dom per­son decid­ed 10 000 steps was the goal we should all be aspir­ing to, peo­ple all over the world are now look­ing at their dis­plays and feel bad if they only man­aged 9876 steps in one day.

Tech­nol­o­gy cre­ates norms which are based on human behav­iour, which in turn deter­mines human behav­iour. It’s an inter­ac­tion which only has one goal in the end: Con­trol­ling behav­iour so that it can be mon­e­tarised. You haven’t man­aged your 10 000 steps? Well then try get­ting these amaz­ing shoes which were recent­ly worn for some world record. Or this par­tic­u­lar pro­tein pow­der. Or a more gen­er­ous app.

The goal of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion is to turn peo­ple in con­sum­ing machines, who can order every bit of rub­bish they want ²⁴⁄₇ with­out leav­ing the com­fort of their homes, and with the appro­pri­ate loan to match. It can hard­ly be a coin­ci­dence that all dig­i­tal con­cerns are forc­ing their way into bank­ing. Those are the clos­est trea­sures to be appropriated.

If so much is being sim­pli­fied or stan­dard­ised, what will hap­pen to social behav­iour in this context?

Social behav­iour is not a pri­ma­ry goal of the algo­rithms in ques­tion – at least not in West­ern soci­ety. The big tech com­pa­nies are con­fig­ured so that they make as much mon­ey as pos­si­ble by using as much automa­tion as pos­si­ble: Google and Face­book have appro­pri­at­ed the adver­tis­ing mar­kets for them­selves while Ama­zon has tak­en over trade and, of course, we have Net­flix, Spo­ti­fy, Airbnb and oth­er com­pa­nies in oth­er domains. Social behav­iour is thus being reduced, if we con­tin­ue using this com­mer­cial log­ic, to shar­ing, which is real­ly rec­om­mend­ing, or obtain­ing prod­ucts for free. Look, Dr Cal­daro­la has been watch­ing this TV series and would­n’t this show work for you as well? And you’ll get a 20% discount.

In Chi­na, how­ev­er, social behav­iour is being steered in a more insid­i­ous way by means of the Social Cred­it Sys­tem. If you brake at the cross­walk, you’ll get some points added to your score, but if you speak against the polit­i­cal par­ty, that will def­i­nite­ly mean points tak­en away. If you hap­pen to be a Uighur, then you’ll be in a point deficit for your whole life, sim­ply by virtue of the fact that you are a Uighur. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly treach­er­ous if you meet some­one who does­n’t have many points because then you’ll have points tak­en away just for that. Mere­ly talk­ing to a Uighur could cost you your vaca­tion. In this way, an entire soci­ety is being seg­re­gat­ed, not in a geo­graph­ic or social sense, but by being placed in dig­i­tal ghet­tos. In fact, this sys­tem is high­ly effec­tive, at least for those in pow­er. For who decides what social behav­iour is desir­able if not the Com­mu­nist Party?

The TV series “Black Mir­ror” illus­trat­ed these devel­op­ments in a par­tic­u­lar­ly clever fash­ion. But let’s go back to the top­ic of free­dom: If a Social Cred­it Sys­tem were to be offered in Europe which had been adapt­ed to West­ern char­ac­ter­is­tics, and the sys­tem promised to low­er the crime rate by 50%, how many peo­ple would choose free­dom and how many would opt for the Chi­nese ver­sion of secu­ri­ty? In the end, the sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism of Sil­i­con Val­ley and Chi­nese sur­veil­lance social­ism start to resem­ble one anoth­er to a dis­turb­ing degree.

Robots, algo­rithms, AI are sup­posed to replace peo­ple and to make pro­duc­tion more effec­tive and more effi­cient with­in the frame­work of Indus­try 4.0. They all use Big Data to find cor­re­la­tions, to devel­op algo­rithms, to train staff and to enable AI. Big Data can find out quan­ti­ta­tive aspects, such as the fastest, great­est and the most often and so on and so forth. But what is hap­pen­ing to qual­i­ta­tive aspects, such as West­ern val­ues, human dig­ni­ty, a per­son­’s ambi­tion, ethics, sol­i­dar­i­ty, pri­va­cy, defin­ing your own goals, emo­tions, strate­gies? Or does the dig­i­tal age no longer need such things any­more because every­one is the same or will be the same?

The val­ues of the Occi­dent are not of much con­cern to soft­ware devel­op­ers and their advo­cates. I recent­ly read an inter­view with a game pro­gram­mer, who wished to remain anony­mous, and he was quite hon­est about what is impor­tant as far as dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion goes: rev­enues, of course.

Any­one who works in the games sec­tor is well aware that com­put­er games are addic­tive because the play­ers are con­stant­ly being del­uged with dopamine. Dopamine is pret­ty much as addic­tive as nico­tine, but you can’t for­bid it because your own body pro­duces it.

It’s an amaz­ing busi­ness mod­el: Deal­ing is legal, and the junkies are more or less social indi­vid­u­als, if you ignore the tem­per tantrums exhib­it­ed by chil­dren and adults as soon as you try to stop them from play­ing- in oth­er words, a clas­sic case of with­draw­al symptoms.

Every sec­ond which a cus­tomer spends on his or her com­put­er trans­lates into a ver­i­ta­ble mine of infor­ma­tion: Which obsta­cles annoy play­ers, where and with which fig­ures do they like to spend time with, how much mon­ey are they pre­pared to spend on spe­cial fea­tures, at which point do they stop play­ing? The goal of every dig­i­tal prod­uct, whether it be Fort­nite, Tik­Tok, Net­flix or Face­book is to keep the cus­tomer hooked for as long as possible.

And you’re talk­ing about dig­ni­ty, moral­i­ty, sol­i­dar­i­ty, pri­va­cy. Does­n’t that make you feel nos­tal­gic for those old-fash­ioned values?

Inno­va­tion thrives on mis­takes and learn­ing from these mis­takes. Chil­dren fall down and try to get up again and then keep on prac­tic­ing until they have fig­ured it out. How­ev­er, from the moment chil­dren begin going to school, they are taught to make as few mis­takes as pos­si­ble. Fail­ing is judged neg­a­tive­ly, even though it is pos­si­ble to learn some­thing new, some­thing bet­ter from it. Inno­va­tion is the most sig­nif­i­cant, if not the only tool to increase our GDP. Why do we forego this process? Or is stan­dard­i­s­a­tion the new innovation?

Stan­dard­i­s­a­tion com­bines mar­ket and planned economies. It does away with com­pe­ti­tion and only favours inno­va­tion which is of use to one’s own advancement.

Ama­zon has suc­ceed­ed to do what com­mu­nism could nev­er man­age: Name­ly, to take con­trol of a mar­ket and all its process­es and, at the same time, it has done away with the mech­a­nisms of a free market.

All the para­me­ters in ques­tion, from the needs of cus­tomers to the weath­er dur­ing trans­porta­tion, from stor­age to the mood of the deliv­ery per­son, they have all been fac­tored in. A small-scale sup­pli­er has to be part of Ama­zon and be squeezed for a 30% com­mis­sion. In return, Ama­zon knows all my trade secrets, costs, returns. If my prod­uct is in high demand, Ama­zon can under­bid me any­time and cur­tail my online pres­ence. The future is being deter­mined by plat­forms, so-called pro­pri­etary mar­kets, which have can­celled com­pe­ti­tion in the clas­sic sense of the word. There is a lot of inno­va­tion tak­ing place, but only if it serves the Ama­zon cartel.

Robert Musil wrote in his unfin­ished nov­el, The Man with­out Qual­i­ties, “Com­plete­ly fine is as if it were the ruin of all progress and plea­sure.” Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion is bring­ing us order, uni­for­mi­ty, stan­dards, con­sis­ten­cy… Will this be the ruin of humans, the loss of our human diver­si­ty- a process which, at the same time, is tak­ing place quite dif­fer­ent­ly if we look at the cur­rent drop in species in the plant and ani­mal world?

At this point, I would like to say some­thing in favour of stan­dard­i­s­a­tion. When the indus­tri­al world pow­er Great Britain was still print­ing “Made in Ger­many” on Ger­man prod­ucts in order to dis­cred­it things com­ing from the pota­to state, it was pre­cise­ly the stan­dard nature of Ger­man pro­duc­tion that brought an end to British hege­mo­ny and favoured the rise of Ger­many becom­ing an indus­tri­al nation. For, all of sud­den, nuts and bolts and screws all had to fit because they had all been stan­dard­ised. If we are talk­ing about mass pro­duc­tion and pre­ci­sion, then hav­ing a cer­tain norm is a bless­ing. How stan­dar­d­is­ing human behav­iour works, is some­thing we are try­ing out as we speak.

In your opin­ion, will “dig­i­tal progress” con­tin­ue to gain ground, with­out any con­sid­er­a­tion for the con­comi­tant loss­es, while adher­ing to the mot­to: What­ev­er can be done, will be done?

I think the real ques­tion here is: Do coun­tries still have the pow­er to set them­selves against glob­al play­ers like Google?

Let’s assume Google wants to pre­vent a politi­cian who is lob­by­ing hard for heavy tax­a­tion of dig­i­tal com­pa­nies. Can we exclude the pos­si­bil­i­ty that this politi­cian will now find that his name is being list­ed in con­nec­tion with prob­lem­at­ic search items, that neg­a­tive sto­ries, in par­tic­u­lar, are at the top of the list, that one day cer­tain details from his life will pos­si­bly come to light.

What would hap­pen if some­one put togeth­er a list of all of your search queries from the last twen­ty years with­out any sort of com­ment and then pub­lished it? What if they include your move­ment pro­file, cred­it card bills, tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions, chats- and let’s not leave out our press which is very hun­gry for sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic news.

Who is so naive as to think that a com­mer­cial busi­ness would not manip­u­late its search algo­rithm if its image or stock mar­ket price were at risk?

Google is in a posi­tion to destroy every sin­gle per­son in the world and every pub­lic fig­ure knows that. Does a coun­try have the pow­er to fight that, does the chan­cel­lor have the courage to go to war against dig­i­tal war machines? Have fun with that thought. The bat­tle has already been lost if we do not soon use the Rock­e­feller solu­tion: Crush it. And do it thor­ough­ly. Eco­nom­ic monop­o­lies are bad enough, but infor­ma­tion monop­o­lies are much more dangerous.

Do algo­rithms, AI and robots ask crit­i­cal ques­tions and are they tak­ing over our capac­i­ty for thought and inno­va­tion? Can we depend on them? Are we say­ing: “Don’t wor­ry, this is just a nor­mal evo­lu­tion­ary process at work”? In oth­er words, peo­ple on this plan­et have always been on the look-out for extra-ter­res­tri­al beings. Are we cre­at­ing this fan­ta­sy world for our­selves through dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, avatars, dig­i­tal twins, robots … and is that going to rep­re­sent our new inno­va­tion and creativity?

If we have learned one thing in the past years it is that the harm­less nut­cas­es who were fit­ting­ly called evan­ge­lists and who cre­at­ed some ran­dom fan­tasies at the behest of data com­pa­nies which had to do with eter­nal life and out­er space sta­tions and all the oth­er sci­ence fic­tion stuff which, by the way, we have always been hap­py to hear about ever since Jules Verne, all of it served one pur­pose: These sto­ries were meant to pro­vide ruth­less and exceed­ing­ly unre­mark­able mon­ey machines with a meta-plane, a high­er mean­ing, some­thing pseudo-religious.

The fact is that the so-called alpha­bet com­pa­ny, which sup­pos­ed­ly pro­motes med­i­cine, gene sequenc­ing, mod­ern trans­port and a vari­ety of oth­er trendy top­ics, is actu­al­ly just an emp­ty shell being fuelled from a sin­gle pipeline which hap­pens to be the huge amount of cash being earned by the search engine known as Google with its glob­al monopoly.

It’s a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion with Face­book. These com­pa­nies are not exact­ly gifts from the gods. Rather, they work at a very triv­ial lev­el, just like Big­To­bac­co, BigAl­co­hol, Big­Petrol, Big­Sug­ar or BigO­pi­oid: They mere­ly make you addict­ed to their prod­uct, defend their monop­oly by all avail­able means, bribe research so it is in their favour, make mon­ey as long as pol­i­tics allows this to hap­pen, leave the ensu­ing dam­age to soci­ety, but, by all means, let’s donate a few muse­ums or libraries so as to make the com­pa­ny sound nicer for the gen­er­a­tions to come.

I do have one final thought con­cern­ing, as you put it, “our nor­mal evo­lu­tion­ary process”: The inter­net is like cli­mate change: We know what awaits us. And it won’t go away if we sim­ply ignore it. We know all the mech­a­nisms of addic­tion, the emp­ty promis­es, the tricks of influ­encers, the help­less­ness of pol­i­tics. How­ev­er, when peo­ple pre­fer to stare at their dis­plays instead of look­ing at peo­ple’s faces, then we have to face the fact that this devel­op­ment is quick­ly becom­ing real­i­ty. But is any­one real­ly going to call this dis­turb­ing trend “progress” and, more to the point, what are we pro­gress­ing to?

My opin­ion is:

A good life is still pos­si­ble in dig­i­tal times

Dr Hajo Schumacher

Dr Schu­mach­er, thank you so much for shar­ing your opin­ion, your thoughts and your view on stan­dard­iza­tion ver­sus individuality.

Thank you, Dr Cal­daro­la, and I look for­ward to read­ing your upcom­ing inter­views with rec­og­nized experts, delv­ing even deep­er into this fas­ci­nat­ing topic.