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Ed Webb

Tripping Cyborgs and Organ Farms: The Fictions of Cordwainer Smith | NeuroTribes - 0 views

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    Fascinating
weismans95

We Are Already Cyborgs - YouTube - 2 views

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    Technology+evolution?
Ed Webb

The Vulture Transcript: Sci-Fi Author William Gibson on Why He Loves Twitter, Thinks Fa... - 0 views

  • If you’re born now, your native culture is global, to an increasing extent. There are things that are unknowable for futurists of any stripe, be they science-fiction writing charlatans like myself or anthropologists in the employ of large automobile companies who are paid to figure out what people might want in ten years. One of the things that’s unknowable is how humanity will use any new technology. No one imagines that we’d wind up with a world that looks like this on the basis of the technology that’s emerged in the last hundred years. Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were. I’m sitting here at age 52 with almost all of my own teeth. That didn’t used to happen. I’m a cyborg. I’m immune to any number of lethal diseases by virtue of technology. I’m sitting on top of this enormous pyramid of technology that starts with flint hand-axes and finds me in a hotel in Austin, Texas, talking to someone thousands of miles away on a telephone and that’s just what we do. At this point, we don’t have the option of not being technological creatures.
  • You’ve taken to Twitter (GreatDismal). I have indeed. I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.
  • Twitter’s huge. There’s a whole culture of people on Twitter who do nothing but handicap racehorses. I’ll never go there. One commonality about people I follow is that they’re all doing what I’m doing: They’re all using it as novelty aggregation and out of that grows some sense of being part of a community. It’s a strange thing. There are countless millions of communities on Twitter. They occupy the same virtual space but they never see each other. They never interact. Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.
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  • The Civil War was scarcely more than 150 years ago. It’s yesterday. Race in American hasn’t been sorted out. This used to be a country that was run exclusively by white guys in suits. It’s not going to be a country that’s run exclusively by white guys in suits, and that doesn’t have anything to do with politics, it’s just demographics. That makes some people very uncomfortable. The tea party is like the GOP’s Southern strategy coming back to exact the real cost of that strategy.
weismans95

Ex Machina move trailer - 1 views

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    Yet another take on the cyborg/robot/AI story
Ed Webb

Programmed for Love: The Unsettling Future of Robotics - The Chronicle Review - The Chr... - 0 views

  • Her prediction: Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, "transgressive," and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It's not that she's against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She's concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.
  • y: We are already cyborgs, reliant on digital devices in ways that many of us could not have imagined just a few years ago
  • "We are hard-wired that if something meets extremely primitive standards, either eye contact or recognition or very primitive mutual signaling, to accept it as an Other because as animals that's how we're hard-wired—to recognize other creatures out there."
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  • "Can a broken robot break a child?" they asked. "We would not consider the ethics of having children play with a damaged copy of Microsoft Word or a torn Raggedy Ann doll. But sociable robots provoke enough emotion to make this ethical question feel very real."
  • "The concept of robots as baby sitters is, intellectually, one that ought to appeal to parents more than the idea of having a teenager or similarly inexperienced baby sitter responsible for the safety of their infants," he writes. "Their smoke-detection capabilities will be better than ours, and they will never be distracted for the brief moment it can take an infant to do itself some terrible damage or be snatched by a deranged stranger."
  • "What if we get used to relationships that are made to measure?" Turkle asks. "Is that teaching us that relationships can be just the way we want them?" After all, if a robotic partner were to become annoying, we could just switch it off.
  • We've reached a moment, she says, when we should make "corrections"—to develop social norms to help offset the feeling that we must check for messages even when that means ignoring the people around us. "Today's young people have a special vulnerability: Although always connected, they feel deprived of attention," she writes. "Some, as children, were pushed on swings while their parents spoke on cellphones. Now these same parents do their e-mail at the dinner table." One 17-year-old boy even told her that at least a robot would remember everything he said, contrary to his father, who often tapped at a BlackBerry during conversations.
weismans95

Black Mirror - 0 views

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    This dark and often disturbing mini-series covers many themes from this class. Each episode questions the role of different technologies in society: from recording memories to talent shows. The episode "Be Right Back" is especially relevant to our discussions of cyborgs and AI.
Ed Webb

Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson | CCCB LAB - 0 views

  • The idea would be that not only do you have a multigenerational project of building a new world, but obviously the human civilization occupying it would also be new. And culturally and politically, it would be an achievement that would have no reason to stick with old forms from the history of Earth. It’s a multigenerational project, somewhat like building these cathedrals in Europe where no generation expects to end the job. By the time the job is near completion, the civilization operating it will be different to the one that began the project.
  • what the Mars scenario gave me – and gives all of humanity – is the idea that the physical substrate of the planet itself is also a part of the project, and it’s something that we are strong enough to influence. Not create, not completely control, not completely engineer because it’s too big and we don´t have that much ability to manipulate the large systems involved, nor the amount of power involved. But we do have enough to mess things up and we do have enough to finesse the system.This, I think, was a precursor to the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is precisely the geological moment when humanity becomes a geological force, and it’s a science-fiction exercise to say that 50 million years from now, humanity’s descendants, or some other alien civilization, will be able to look at Earth and say: “This is when humanity began to impact things as much as volcanos or earthquakes.” So it’s a sci-fi story being told in contemporary culture as one way to define what we are doing now. So, that was what my Mars project was doing, and now we are in the Anthropocene as a mental space.
  • if humanity’s impact on the Earth is mostly negative in ecological terms, if you mark humanity’s impact as being so significant that we have produced a new geological age, then we have to think differently in our attitudes towards what we are doing with our biophysical substrate. And one of the things I think the Anthropocene brings up is that the Earth is our body, and we can finesse it, we can impact it, we can make ourselves sick.
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  • The truth is that we are actually already at that moment of climate change and crisis. The political project that my novel discusses really ought to be enacted now, not 120 years from now. In the real world, what we’ve got is a necessity for our economic system to take damage to the ecosystem into account, and pay for that damage.
  • I worry that we’ve already swallowed the idea of the Anthropocene and stopped considering the importance of it; the profound shock that it should cause has already been diffused into just one more idea game that we play.
  • there is no question that, at times in the past, the Earth has been an ice ball with none of its water melted, and also a jungle planet with all of its water melted, and no ice on the planet whatsoever. And this is just from the natural extremes of planetary orbiting, and feedback loops of the atmosphere that we have naturally. But then what humanity is doing – and the reason you need the term “Anthropocene” – is pushing us into zones that the planet maybe has been in the past, but never with this extraordinary speed. Things that would have taken three, four, five million years in the past, or even longer, a 50-million-year process, are being done in fifty years, a million times faster
  • The market doesn’t have a brain, a conscience, a morality or a sense of history. The market only has one rule and it’s a bad rule, a rule that would only work in a world where there was an infinity of raw materials, what the eco-Marxists are calling the “four cheaps”: cheap food, cheap power, cheap labour, cheap raw material
  • this isn’t the way capitalism works, as currently configured; this isn’t profitable. The market doesn’t like it. By the market I mean – what I think everybody means, but doesn’t admit – capital, accumulated capital, and where it wants to put itself next. And where it wants to put itself next is at the highest rate of return, so that if it’s a 7% return to invest in vacation homes on the coast of Spain, and it’s only a 6% rate of return to build a new clean power plant out in the empty highlands of Spain, the available capital of this planet will send that money and investment and human work into vacation homes on the coast of Spain rather than the power plants
  • If Spain were to do a certain amount for its country, but was sacrificing relative to international capital or to other countries, then it would be losing the battle for competitive advantage in the capitalist system
  • Nobody can afford to volunteer to be extra virtuous in a system where the only rule is quarterly profit and shareholder value. Where the market rules, all of us are fighting for the crumbs to get the best investment for the market.
  • the market is like a blind giant driving us off a cliff into destruction
  • we need postcapitalism
  • I look to the next generation, to people who are coming into their own intellectual power and into political and economic power, to be the most productive citizens, at the start of their careers, to change the whole story. But, sometimes it just strikes me as astonishing, how early on we are in our comprehension of this system
  • design is a strange amalgam, like a science-fictional cyborg between art and engineering, planning, building, and doing things in the real world
  • you can´t have permanent growth.
  • The Anthropocene is that moment in which capitalist expansion can no longer expand, and you get a crush of the biophysical system – that’s climate change – and then you get a crush of the political economy because, if you’ve got a system that demands permanent growth, capital accumulation and profit and you can’t do it anymore, you get a crisis that can’t be solved by the next expansion
  • If the Anthropocene is a crisis, an end of the road for capitalism, well, what is post-capitalism? This I find painfully under-discussed and under-theorized. As a Sci-Fi writer, an English major, a storyteller – not a theorist nor a political economist – looking for help, looking for theories and speculations as to what will come next and how it will work, and finding a near emptiness.
  • here is the aporia, as they call it: the non-seeing that is in human culture today. This is another aspect of the Anthropocene
  • Economics is the quantitative and systematic analysis of capitalism itself. Economics doesn’t do speculative or projective economics; perhaps it should, I mean, I would love it if it did, but it doesn’t
  • If the rules of that global economy were good, there could not be bad actors because if the G20,  95% of the economy, were all abiding by good rules, there would be nowhere for greedy actors to escape to, to enact their greed.
  • You can see the shapes of a solution. This is very important for anybody that wants to have hope or everybody that is realizing that there will be humans after us, the generations to come. It’s strange because they are absent; they are going to be here, they are going to be our descendants and they are even going to have our DNA in them. They will be versions of us but because they are not here now, it’s very easy to dismiss their concerns.
  • capitalist economics discounts their concerns, in the technical term of what is called in economics “the discount rate”. So, a high discount rate in your economic calculations of value — like amortized payments or borrowing from the future – says: “The future isn’t important to us, they will take care of themselves” and a low discount rate says: “We are going to account for the future, we think the future matters, the people yet to come matter.” That choice of a discount rate is entirely an ethical and political decision; it’s not a technical or scientific decision except for, perhaps, the technical suggestion that if you want your children to survive you’d better choose a lower discount rate. But that “if” is kind of a moral, an imaginative statement, and less practical in the long-term view.
  • I have been talking about these issues for about fifteen years and, ten years ago, to suggest that the Paris Agreement would be signed, people would say: “but that will never happen!” As a utopian science-fiction writer, it was a beautiful moment.
  • As a Science-Fiction writer, what is in your view the responsibility that the arts, literature and literary fiction can have in helping to articulate possible futures? It seems that imagining other forms of living is key to producing them, to make them actionable.
  • The sciences are maybe the dominant cultural voice in finding out what’s going on in the world and how things work, and the technicalities about how and why things work. But how that feels, the emotional impact in it, which is so crucial to the human mind and human life in general, these are what the arts provide
  • The way that we create energy and the way that we move around on this planet both have to be de-carbonized. That has to be, if not profitable, affordable
  • This is what bothers me in economics; its blind adherence to the capitalist moment even when it is so destructive. Enormous amounts of intellectual energy are going into the pseudo-quantitative legal analysis of an already-existing system that’s destructive. Well, this is not good enough anymore because it’s wrecking the biophysical infrastructure
  • What would that new way of living be? The economists are not going to think of it. The artists are often not specific enough in their technical and physical detail, so they can become fantasy novelists rather than science-fiction novelists; there is too much a possibility in the arts, and I know very well myself, of having a fantasy response, a wish fulfilment. But when you’re doing architecture you think: “Well, I need ten million dollars, I need this land, I need to entrain the lives of five hundred people for ten years of their careers in order to make something that then will be good for the future generations to use.”
  • After the 2008 crash of the world economy, the neoliberal regime began to look a bit more fragile and brutal, less massive and immovable. I see things very differently, the world reacting very differently since the 2008 crash to how it did before it. There was this blind faith that capitalism worked, and also even if it didn’t work it wasn’t changeable, it was too massive to change. Now what I am pointing out comes from the radical economists coming out of political economy, anthropology and leftist politics saying that international finance is simply overleveraged and therefore is extremely fragile and open to being taken down. Because it depends on everybody paying their bills and fulfilling their contracts.
  • Human extinction, this is bullshit. Humans will scratch around and find some refuge. You could imagine horrible disasters and reductions of human population but extinction is not the issue for humans, it’s for everybody else. All of our horizontal brothers and sisters, the other big mammals, are in terrible trouble from our behaviour
  • I actually am offended at this focus on the human; “Oh, we’ll be in trouble,”: big deal. We deserve to be in trouble, we created the trouble. The extinctions of the other big mammals: the tigers, rhinoceroses, all big mammals that aren’t domestic creatures of our own built in factories, are in terrible trouble. So, the human effort ought to be towards avoiding extinctions of other creatures. Never waste a worry for humanity itself, which, no matter what, won’t become extinct. Ten centuries from now, humanity will be doing something and that something is likely to be more sustainable and interesting than what we are doing now. The question for us is. “How do you get there?” But ten centuries from now, there might not be any tigers.
  • There’s an Antonio Gramsci idea you have used to explain your position: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Your optimism is a moral and political position, it’s not just hoping for the best. Why do you think we need to defend optimism
  • Use the optimism as a club, to beat the crap out of people who are saying that we are doomed, who are saying let’s give up now. And this “let’s give up now” can be very elaborated academically. You can say: “Well, I’m just into adaptation rather than mitigation, there’s nothing we can do about climate change, all you can do is adapt to it.” In other words, stick with capitalism, stick with the market, and don’t get freaked out. Just adapt and get your tenure because it is usually academics who say it, and they’re not usually in design or architecture, they aren’t really doing things. They’re usually in philosophy or in theory. They come out of my departments, they’re telling a particular story and I don’t like that story. My story is: the optimism that I’m trying to express is that there won’t be an apocalypse, there will be a disaster. But after the disaster comes the next world on.
  • there’s a sort of apocalyptic end-of-the-world “ism” that says that I don’t have to change my behaviour, I don’t have to try because it’s already doomed
  • Maybe optimism is a kind of moral imperative, you have to stay optimistic because otherwise you’re just a wanker that’s taken off into your own private Idaho of “Oh well, things are bad.” It’s so easy to be cynical; it’s so easy to be pessimistic
Ed Webb

The Digital Maginot Line - 0 views

  • The Information World War has already been going on for several years. We called the opening skirmishes “media manipulation” and “hoaxes”, assuming that we were dealing with ideological pranksters doing it for the lulz (and that lulz were harmless). In reality, the combatants are professional, state-employed cyberwarriors and seasoned amateur guerrillas pursuing very well-defined objectives with military precision and specialized tools. Each type of combatant brings a different mental model to the conflict, but uses the same set of tools.
  • There are also small but highly-skilled cadres of ideologically-motivated shitposters whose skill at information warfare is matched only by their fundamental incomprehension of the real damage they’re unleashing for lulz. A subset of these are conspiratorial — committed truthers who were previously limited to chatter on obscure message boards until social platform scaffolding and inadvertently-sociopathic algorithms facilitated their evolution into leaderless cults able to spread a gospel with ease.
  • There’s very little incentive not to try everything: this is a revolution that is being A/B tested.
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  • The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.
  • Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure
  • Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle. But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale. Even actual hacks are increasingly done in service of influence operations: stolen, leaked emails, for example, were profoundly effective at shaping a national narrative in the U.S. election of 2016.
  • The substantial time and money spent on defense against critical-infrastructure hacks is one reason why poorly-resourced adversaries choose to pursue a cheap, easy, low-cost-of-failure psy-ops war instead
  • Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases (Brexit) and clear indications of it in others (Duterte). They’ve targeted corporations and industries. And they’ve certainly gone after mores: social media became the main battleground for the culture wars years ago, and we now describe the unbridgeable gap between two polarized Americas using technological terms like filter bubble. But ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.
  • This shift from targeting infrastructure to targeting the minds of civilians was predictable. Theorists  like Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan saw it coming decades ago. As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
  • The 2014-2016 influence operation playbook went something like this: a group of digital combatants decided to push a specific narrative, something that fit a long-term narrative but also had a short-term news hook. They created content: sometimes a full blog post, sometimes a video, sometimes quick visual memes. The content was posted to platforms that offer discovery and amplification tools. The trolls then activated collections of bots and sockpuppets to blanket the biggest social networks with the content. Some of the fake accounts were disposable amplifiers, used mostly to create the illusion of popular consensus by boosting like and share counts. Others were highly backstopped personas run by real human beings, who developed standing audiences and long-term relationships with sympathetic influencers and media; those accounts were used for precision messaging with the goal of reaching the press. Israeli company Psy Group marketed precisely these services to the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign; as their sales brochure put it, “Reality is a Matter of Perception”.
  • If an operation is effective, the message will be pushed into the feeds of sympathetic real people who will amplify it themselves. If it goes viral or triggers a trending algorithm, it will be pushed into the feeds of a huge audience. Members of the media will cover it, reaching millions more. If the content is false or a hoax, perhaps there will be a subsequent correction article – it doesn’t matter, no one will pay attention to it.
  • Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead. Hostile state intelligence services in particular are now increasingly adept at operating collections of human-operated precision personas, often called sockpuppets, or cyborgs, that will escape punishment under the the bot laws. They will simply work harder to ingratiate themselves with real American influencers, to join real American retweet rings. If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.
  • Attempts to legislate away 2016 tactics primarily have the effect of triggering civil libertarians, giving them an opportunity to push the narrative that regulators just don’t understand technology, so any regulation is going to be a disaster.
  • The entities best suited to mitigate the threat of any given emerging tactic will always be the platforms themselves, because they can move fast when so inclined or incentivized. The problem is that many of the mitigation strategies advanced by the platforms are the information integrity version of greenwashing; they’re a kind of digital security theater, the TSA of information warfare
  • Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of  Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups
  • platforms aren’t incentivized to engage in the profoundly complex arms race against the worst actors when they can simply point to transparency reports showing that they caught a fair number of the mediocre actors
  • What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation. We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.
  • We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.
  • Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.
  • Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets.
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