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Todd Suomela

Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance - 0 views

idlewords.com/...build_a_better_monster.htm

technology-critique technology-effects internet surveillance activism ethics engineering

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately, the enemy is complacency. Tech workers trust their founders, find labor organizing distasteful, and are happy to leave larger ethical questions to management. A workplace free of 'politics' is just one of the many perks the tech industry offers its pampered employees. So our one chance to enact meaningful change is slipping away. Unless something happens to mobilize the tech workforce, or unless the advertising bubble finally bursts, we can expect the weird, topsy-turvy status quo of 2017 to solidify into the new reality. But even though we're likely to fail, all we can do is try. Good intentions are not going to make these structural problems go away. Talking about them is not going to fix them. We have to do something.
  • Can we fix it? Institutions can be destroyed quickly; they take a long time to build. A lot of what we call ‘disruption’ in the tech industry has just been killing flawed but established institutions, and mining them for parts. When we do this, we make a dangerous assumption about our ability to undo our own bad decisions, or the time span required to build institutions that match the needs of new realities. Right now, a small caste of programmers is in charge of the surveillance economy, and has broad latitude to change it. But this situation will not last for long. The kinds of black-box machine learning that have been so successful in the age of mass surveillance are going to become commoditized and will no longer require skilled artisans to deploy. Moreover, powerful people have noted and benefited from the special power of social media in the political arena. They will not sit by and let programmers dismantle useful tools for influence and social control. It doesn’t matter that the tech industry considers itself apolitical and rationalist. Powerful people did not get to be that way by voluntarily ceding power. The window of time in which the tech industry can still act is brief: while tech workers retain relatively high influence in their companies, and before powerful political interests have put down roots in the tech industry.
jatolbert

Scholarly, digital, open: an impossible triangle? | Goodfellow | Research in Learning T... - 1 views

journals.co-action.net/...21366

shared by jatolbert on 05 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Scholarship is discussed below from both institutional and individual perspectives. The view I am starting from is that ‘scholarship’ refers to a set of epistemological and ethical practices that underpin the social construction of an enduring record of objectively validated knowledge. By this definition teaching and learning is not scholarship, although it may draw on scholarship and be done by scholars.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 05 Jul 17
       
      Hugely disagree. The first part may be reasonable enough, although I disagree with the notion of "objectively validated knowledge" as a necessary component of scholarship (how is it "objective"? how can it be "validated"?). But to claim that teaching is separate from scholarship is problematic.
  • Research in this area always runs the risk of collapsing into reflexivity, as digital scholars turn the lens of enquiry onto themselves, but grounded and critical research into situated practice in areas of research, teaching and public engagement where both scholarship in all its forms and digitality in all its manifestations are prominent is possible and should be pursued.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 05 Jul 17
       
      Is reflexivity a bad thing? In the social sciences it's a sine qua non.
  • There is an inherent tension between practices that aim to open up the social construction of knowledge to universal participation, and those which aim to deepen the understanding of specialist communities and establish a stable and enduring record. Nevertheless, it is the role of many scholars to be involved in both. To bring scholarship, teaching and public engagement closer together must surely be the aim, but first we need to understand the ways in which practice makes them different.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 05 Jul 17
       
      I mostly agree with this bit, although I prefer the proper reading of Boyer's model, i.e., that research, teaching, and "public engagement" (which falls into Boyer's category of Application) are -all- forms of scholarship.
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