Book Tip No. 52 (2022): Gerd Gigerenzer: Click. How we maintain control and make the right decisions in a digital world.

Munich 2021.

By Hans-Christian Riekhof

Few books on the subject of digitalization are written by psychologists. This book is one of them: Gerd Gigerenzer deals with our handling of the digital world from the perspective of behavioral sciences. His book on risk (Risk: How to make the right decisions) has provided many surprising insights into how sensibly (or rather not sensibly) we deal with the risks around us. Risk competence is not learned in school. But also not in studies. And yet we need it, just like the competence in dealing with a digital world.

What are the topics that Gerd Gigerenzer addresses in detail?

They include:

• our ignorance about what companies record about us
• the lack of courage of political parties to better regulate the handling of data in a digital world
• the inability of AI-based systems to prove their performance in an unstable world
• the low probability that we will have self-driving cars in the near future
• the superiority of common sense in many complex problems and the possibility of deceiving neural networks
• the impressive but useless or nonsensical correlations calculated by AI
• the questionable use of Black Box algorithms in jurisprudence
• the discrimination effects that can arise from the use of AI systems
• the serious deficiencies of today’s data protection legislation
• the method of Alan Lichtman, with which he correctly predicted the election of Donald Trump (without relying on Big Data and algorithms)
• the (secret) use of Social Scoring Systems not only in China, but also in the Western world
• our lack of willingness to pay for more data protection.

A book that provides extremely many exciting insights into the functioning of the digital world, and a must-read for politicians. Let’s hope that lawmakers will address this issue more quickly and consistently than before.