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Ed Webb

The enemy between us: how inequality erodes our mental health | openDemocracy - 1 views

  • Most people probably don’t think that broader, structural issues to do with politics and the economy have anything to do with their emotional health and wellbeing, but they do. We’ve known for a long time that inequality causes a wide range of health and social problems, including everything from reduced life expectancy and higher infant mortality to poor educational attainment, lower social mobility and increased levels of violence. Differences in these areas between more and less equal societies are large, and everyone is affected by them.
  • inequality eats into the heart of our immediate, personal world, and the vast majority of the population are affected by the ways in which inequality becomes the enemy between us. What gets between us and other people are all the things that make us feel ill at ease with one another, worried about how others see us, and shy and awkward in company—in short, all our social anxieties
  • An epidemic of distress seems to be gripping some of the richest nations in the world
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  • Socioeconomic inequality matters because it strengthens the belief that some people are worth much more than others. Those at the top seem hugely important and those at the bottom are seen as almost worthless. In more unequal societies we come to judge each other more by status and worry more about how others judge us. Research on 28 European countries shows that inequality increases status anxiety in all income groups, from the poorest ten percent to the richest tenth. The poor are affected most but even the richest ten percent of the population are more worried about status in unequal societies
  • being at the bottom of the social ladder feels the same whether you live in the UK, Norway, Uganda or Pakistan. Therefore, simply raising material living standards is not enough to produce genuine wellbeing or quality of life in the face of inequality
  • Psychotic symptoms such as delusions of grandeur are more common in more unequal countries, as is schizophrenia. As the graph below shows, narcissism increases as income inequality rises, as measured by ‘Narcissistic Personality Inventory’ (NPI) scores from successive samples of the US population.
  • Those who live in more unequal places are more likely to spend money on expensive cars and shop for status goods; and they are more likely to have high levels of personal debt because they try to show that they are not ‘second-class people’ by owning ‘first-class things.’
    • Ed Webb
       
      We might consider this when we read J.G. Ballard's short story "The Subliminal Man"
  • by examining our evolutionary past and our history as egalitarian, cooperative, sharing hunter-gatherers, we dispel the false idea that humans are, in their very nature, competitive, aggressive and individualistic. Inequality is not inevitable and we humans have all the psychological and social aptitudes to live differently.
  • inequalities of outcome limit equality of opportunity; differences in achievement and attainment are driven by inequality, rather than being a consequence of it
  • inequality is a major roadblock to creating sustainable economies that serve to optimise the health and wellbeing of both people and planet.  Because consumerism is about self-enhancement and status competition, it is intensified by inequality. And as inequality leads to a societal breakdown in trust, solidarity and social cohesion, it reduces people’s willingness to act for the common good. This is shown in everything from the tendency for more unequal societies to do less recycling to surveys which show that business leaders in more unequal societies are less supportive of international environmental protection agreements.
  • The UK charity we founded, The Equality Trust, has resources for activists and a network of local groups. In the USA, check out inequality.org. Worldwide, the Fight Inequality Alliance works with more than 100 partners to work for a more equal world. And look out for the new global Wellbeing Economy Alliance this autumn.
  • Inequality creates the social and political divisions that isolate us from each other, so it’s time for us all to reach out, connect, communicate and act collectively. We really are all in this together. 
Ed Webb

The Social Split Between TV and Movie Dystopias - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the screen.The dividing line between television and movies seems to be class conflict.Television shows posit a hideous future with a silver lining; survivors, good or bad, are more or less equals. Movies like “Divergent,” “Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” foresee societal divisions that last into Armageddon and beyond and that define a new, inevitably Orwellian world order that emerges from the ruins of civilization.
  • Movies project a morose, scary future where man is his own worst enemy, whereas television can’t entirely suppress a smile.There is something positive about the end of the world on shows like “The Walking Dead,” and “Z Nation” on Syfy and “The Last Ship,” on TNT. True, civilization as we know it is gone, but so is social stratification. Survivors don’t group into castes according to birth, race, income or religion. People of all kinds bond with whomever seems friendly, or at least unthreatening.
  • Dystopian movies based on young-adult novels understandably focus on the oppression of young adults, but in “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games,” a despotic elite divides the little people into cliques, only there is no prom in sight.Engels wrote about “contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.” He meant in the movies. On TV, all men are equal and equally at peril in the apocalypse.
Ed Webb

The Sci-Fi Roots of the Far Right-From 'Lucifer's Hammer' to Newt's Moon Base to Donald... - 0 views

  • Strong leader Senator Jellison (who is white) then asks former Shire founder Hugo Beck what went wrong, and Beck says his fellow hippies just never realized how great technology and laissez-faire economics were, and now all his old friends are dining on human flesh under the thumb of a scary black communist.
  • Today, Lucifer’s Hammer reads as a depiction of a post-apocalyptic war between Trump counties and Clinton counties, simultaneously promising American renewal even as it depicts unavoidable catastrophe. The comet acts as a cleansing, wiping away so much dead wood of civilization. (Feminism, too, comes in for repeated knocks.)
  • SDI was only one part of a larger right-wing techno-futurist project. SDI historian Edward Linenthal cites a 1983 interview with Newt Gingrich in which the young conservative Congressman predicted that SDI would not just destroy Russia’s Communists but liberalism, too. SDI would be “a dagger at the heart of the liberal welfare state” because it destroys “the liberal myth of scarcity,” leaving only “the limits of a free people’s ingenuity, daring, and courage.”
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  • Gingrich subsequently secured a job for Pournelle’s son with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in 1994, who like Gingrich is now a stalwart space booster and Trump supporter.
  • What Trump does is less important than the fact that he kicks over the table, strengthening America’s military state while demolishing bureaucracy and ignoring niceties. Democracy and law matter less than security and innovation
  • with communism a fading threat by the late 80’s, Gingrich shifted his focus to the specter of a new enemy, arguing in 1989 that “Islamic extremism may well be the greatest threat to Western values and Western security in the world.” Such fear-mongering—Islamic extremism remains a fraction as destructive as the nuclear Soviet Union—may seem ill-suited to optimism in mankind’s future, but as a political project it can be uncannily effective. Pournelle wrote that Islam demands adherence to a principle of “Islam or the sword,” and that an aggressive military response is not only justified but demanded: we are at war with the Caliphate.
  • Gingrich and Pournelle’s enthusiasm had less to do with Trump’s particular ambitions than with his capacity for destruction of the status quo. Much of the chaos Trump foments is, to Gingrich and Pournelle, a key feature to induce the future they want—the one where the feminists and “eco-terrorists” and university professors are soundly defeated
  • In their science fiction as in life, Gingrich and Pournelle shared an optimistic belief in power of technology—and an equally powerful insistence on the inevitability of conflict. They believed this required a robust, authoritarian state apparatus to preserve order and bind citizens together. Indeed, while backing Reagan, Gingrich had promoted a techno-futurism that was less conservative than it was authoritarian: he called for pruning inefficiency while aggressively promoting expansion and military technology. For his part, Pournelle published anthologies of science-fiction and techno-military essays through the 1980s under the name There Will Be War.
  • No science-fiction writer since has exerted as significant a political influence as Pournelle. But Pournelle does have a spiritual successor in Castalia House, the independent science-fiction publisher run by white nationalist Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day. Beale, like Gingrich, has said that his job is to save Western Civilization—and that it is in dire need of saving. Beale, however, is far more explicit about race.
  • Pournelle has dissociated himself from Beale’s politics, but Castalia House’s republishing of Pournelle’s 1980s There Will Be War series (as well as publishing a new volume 10) is no mere coincidence. Rather, they are indications of a shared worldview. To these writers, civil rights, equality, and civil liberties are irritants and impediments to progress at best. At worst, they are impositions on the holy forces of the market and social Darwinism (“evolution in action”) that sort out the best from the rest. And to all of them, the best tend to be white (with a bit of space for “the good ones” of other races). If there has been a shift in thought between the 1970s and today, it’s that the expected separation of wheat from chaff hasn’t taken place, and so now more active measures need to be taken—building the border walls and deportations, for example. Trump is an agent of these active measures—an agent of revolution, or at least the destruction that precedes a revolution.
  • Trump was far from the first to eliminate the line between right-wing thought and outright bigotry.
Ed Webb

DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity - 0 views

  • The human capability for information processing is limited, yet there is an accelerating change in the development and deployment of new technology. This relentless wave upon wave of new information and technology causes an overload on the human mind by eventually flooding it. The resulting acopia -- inability to cope -- has to be solved by the use of ever more sophisticated information intelligence. Extrapolating these capabilities suggests the near-term emergence and visibility of self-improving neural networks, "artificial" intelligence, quantum algorithms, quantum computing and super-intelligence. This metamorphosis is so much beyond present human capabilities that it becomes impossible to understand it with the pre-conceptions and conditioning of the present mindset, societal make-up and existing technology
  • The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity is a transcendence to a wholly new regime of mind, society and technology, in which we have to learn to think in a new way in order to survive as a species.
  • What is globalized human society going to do with the mass of unemployed human beings that are rendered obsolete by the approaching super-intelligence of the Bio-Info-Nano Singularity?
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  • Nothing futurists predict ever comes true, but, by the time the time comes, everybody has forgotten they said it--and then they are free to say something else that never will come true but that everybody will have forgotten they said by the time the time come
  • Most of us will become poisoned troglodytes in a techno dystopia
  • Any engineer can make 'stuff' go faster, kill deader, sort quicker, fly higher, record sharper, destroy more completely, etc.. We have a surfeit of that kind of creativity. What we need is some kind of genius to create a society that treats each other with equality, justice, caring and cooperativeness. The concept of 'singularity' doesn't excite me nearly as much as the idea that sometime we might be able to move beyond the civilization level of a troop of chimpanzees. I'm hoping that genius comes before we manage to destroy what little civilization we have with all our neat "stuff"
  • There's a lot of abstraction in this article, which is a trend of what I have read of a number of various movements taking up the Singularity cause. This nebulous but optimistic prediction of an incomprehensibly advanced future, wherein through technology and science we achieve quasi-immortality, or absolute control of thought, omniscience, or transcendence from the human entirely
  • Welcome to the Frankenstein plot. This is a very common Hollywood plot, the idea of a manmade creation running amok. The concept that the author describes can also be described as an asymtotic curve on a graph where scientific achievement parallels time at first then gradually begins to go vertical until infinite scientific knowledge and invention occurs in an incredibly short time.
Ed Webb

Gay Dallas couple legally weds in Texas, aims to bring e-marriage to the masses - Dalla... - 2 views

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    Could one get married in SecondLife? Via chat or txt?
Ed Webb

The stories of Ray Bradbury. - By Nathaniel Rich - Slate Magazine - 0 views

  • Thanks to Fahrenheit 451, now required reading for every American middle-schooler, Bradbury is generally thought of as a writer of novels, but his talents—particularly his mastery of the diabolical premise and the brain-exploding revelation—are best suited to the short form.
  • The best stories have a strange familiarity about them. They're like long-forgotten acquaintances—you know you've met them somewhere before. There is, for instance, the tale of the time traveler who goes back into time and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby changing irrevocably the course of history ("A Sound of Thunder"). There's the one about the man who buys a robotic husband to live with his wife so that he can be free to travel and pursue adventure—that's "Marionettes, Inc." (Not to be confused with "I Sing the Body Electric!" about the man who buys a robotic grandmother to comfort his children after his wife dies.) Or "The Playground," about the father who changes places with his son so that he can spare his boy the cruelty of childhood—forgetting exactly how cruel childhood can be. The stories are familiar because they've been adapted, and plundered from, by countless other writers—in books, television shows, and films. To the extent that there is a mythology of our age, Bradbury is one of its creators.
  • "But Bradbury's skill is in evoking exactly how soul-annihilating that world is."    Of course, this also displays one of the key facts of Bradbury's work -- and a trend in science fiction that is often ignored. He's a reactionary of the first order, deeply distrustful of technology and even the notion of progress. Many science fiction writers had begun to rewrite the rules of women in space by the time Bradbury had women in long skirts hauling pots and pans over the Martian landscape. And even he wouldn't disagree. In his famous Playboy interview he responded to a question about predicting the future with, "It's 'prevent the future', that's the way I put it. Not predict it, prevent it."
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  • And for the record, I've never understood why a writer who recognizes technology is labeled a "sci-fi writer", as if being a "sci-fi writer" were equal to being some sort of substandard, second-rate hack. The great Kurt Vonnegut managed to get stuck in that drawer after he recognized technolgy in his 1st novel "Player Piano". No matter that he turned out to be (imo) one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, perio
  • it's chilling how prescient he was about modern media culture in Fahrenheit 451. It's not a Luddite screed against TV. It's a speculative piece on what happens when we become divorced from the past and more attuned to images on the screen than we are to each other.
  • ite author of mine since I was in elementary school way back when mammoths roamed the earth. To me, he was an ardent enthusiast of technology, but also recognized its potential for seperating us from one another while at the same time seemingly making us more "connected" in a superficial and transitory way
  • Bradbury is undeniably skeptical of technology and the risks it brings, particularly the risk that what we'd now call "virtualization" will replace actual emotional, intellectual or physical experience. On the other hand, however, I don't think there's anybody who rhapsodizes about the imaginative possibilities of rocketships and robots the way Bradbury does, and he's built entire setpieces around the idea of technological wonders creating new experiences.    I'm not saying he doesn't have a Luddite streak, more that he has feet in both camps and is harder to pin down than a single label allows. And I'll also add that in his public pronouncements of late, the Luddite streak has come out more strongly--but I tend to put much of that down to the curmudgeonliness of a ninety-year-old man.
  • I don't think he is a luddite so much as he is the little voice that whispers "be careful what you wish for." We have been sold the beautiful myth that technology will buy us free time, but we are busier than ever. TV was supposed to enlighten the masses, instead we have "reality TV" and a news network that does not let facts get in the way of its ideological agenda. We romanticize childhood, ignoring children's aggressive impulses, then feed them on a steady diet of violent video games.  
Ed Webb

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans | Pew Research Center - 0 views

  • experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities
  • most experts, regardless of whether they are optimistic or not, expressed concerns about the long-term impact of these new tools on the essential elements of being human. All respondents in this non-scientific canvassing were asked to elaborate on why they felt AI would leave people better off or not. Many shared deep worries, and many also suggested pathways toward solutions. The main themes they sounded about threats and remedies are outlined in the accompanying table.
  • CONCERNS Human agency: Individuals are  experiencing a loss of control over their lives Decision-making on key aspects of digital life is automatically ceded to code-driven, "black box" tools. People lack input and do not learn the context about how the tools work. They sacrifice independence, privacy and power over choice; they have no control over these processes. This effect will deepen as automated systems become more prevalent and complex. Data abuse: Data use and surveillance in complex systems is designed for profit or for exercising power Most AI tools are and will be in the hands of companies striving for profits or governments striving for power. Values and ethics are often not baked into the digital systems making people's decisions for them. These systems are globally networked and not easy to regulate or rein in. Job loss: The AI takeover of jobs will widen economic divides, leading to social upheaval The efficiencies and other economic advantages of code-based machine intelligence will continue to disrupt all aspects of human work. While some expect new jobs will emerge, others worry about massive job losses, widening economic divides and social upheavals, including populist uprisings. Dependence lock-in: Reduction of individuals’ cognitive, social and survival skills Many see AI as augmenting human capacities but some predict the opposite - that people's deepening dependence on machine-driven networks will erode their abilities to think for themselves, take action independent of automated systems and interact effectively with others. Mayhem: Autonomous weapons, cybercrime and weaponized information Some predict further erosion of traditional sociopolitical structures and the possibility of great loss of lives due to accelerated growth of autonomous military applications and the use of weaponized information, lies and propaganda to dangerously destabilize human groups. Some also fear cybercriminals' reach into economic systems.
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  • AI and ML [machine learning] can also be used to increasingly concentrate wealth and power, leaving many people behind, and to create even more horrifying weapons
  • “In 2030, the greatest set of questions will involve how perceptions of AI and their application will influence the trajectory of civil rights in the future. Questions about privacy, speech, the right of assembly and technological construction of personhood will all re-emerge in this new AI context, throwing into question our deepest-held beliefs about equality and opportunity for all. Who will benefit and who will be disadvantaged in this new world depends on how broadly we analyze these questions today, for the future.”
  • SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS Global good is No. 1: Improve human collaboration across borders and stakeholder groups Digital cooperation to serve humanity's best interests is the top priority. Ways must be found for people around the world to come to common understandings and agreements - to join forces to facilitate the innovation of widely accepted approaches aimed at tackling wicked problems and maintaining control over complex human-digital networks. Values-based system: Develop policies to assure AI will be directed at ‘humanness’ and common good Adopt a 'moonshot mentality' to build inclusive, decentralized intelligent digital networks 'imbued with empathy' that help humans aggressively ensure that technology meets social and ethical responsibilities. Some new level of regulatory and certification process will be necessary. Prioritize people: Alter economic and political systems to better help humans ‘race with the robots’ Reorganize economic and political systems toward the goal of expanding humans' capacities and capabilities in order to heighten human/AI collaboration and staunch trends that would compromise human relevance in the face of programmed intelligence.
  • “I strongly believe the answer depends on whether we can shift our economic systems toward prioritizing radical human improvement and staunching the trend toward human irrelevance in the face of AI. I don’t mean just jobs; I mean true, existential irrelevance, which is the end result of not prioritizing human well-being and cognition.”
  • We humans care deeply about how others see us – and the others whose approval we seek will increasingly be artificial. By then, the difference between humans and bots will have blurred considerably. Via screen and projection, the voice, appearance and behaviors of bots will be indistinguishable from those of humans, and even physical robots, though obviously non-human, will be so convincingly sincere that our impression of them as thinking, feeling beings, on par with or superior to ourselves, will be unshaken. Adding to the ambiguity, our own communication will be heavily augmented: Programs will compose many of our messages and our online/AR appearance will [be] computationally crafted. (Raw, unaided human speech and demeanor will seem embarrassingly clunky, slow and unsophisticated.) Aided by their access to vast troves of data about each of us, bots will far surpass humans in their ability to attract and persuade us. Able to mimic emotion expertly, they’ll never be overcome by feelings: If they blurt something out in anger, it will be because that behavior was calculated to be the most efficacious way of advancing whatever goals they had ‘in mind.’ But what are those goals?
  • AI will drive a vast range of efficiency optimizations but also enable hidden discrimination and arbitrary penalization of individuals in areas like insurance, job seeking and performance assessment
  • The record to date is that convenience overwhelms privacy
  • As AI matures, we will need a responsive workforce, capable of adapting to new processes, systems and tools every few years. The need for these fields will arise faster than our labor departments, schools and universities are acknowledging
  • AI will eventually cause a large number of people to be permanently out of work
  • Newer generations of citizens will become more and more dependent on networked AI structures and processes
  • there will exist sharper divisions between digital ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ as well as among technologically dependent digital infrastructures. Finally, there is the question of the new ‘commanding heights’ of the digital network infrastructure’s ownership and control
  • As a species we are aggressive, competitive and lazy. We are also empathic, community minded and (sometimes) self-sacrificing. We have many other attributes. These will all be amplified
  • Given historical precedent, one would have to assume it will be our worst qualities that are augmented
  • Our capacity to modify our behaviour, subject to empathy and an associated ethical framework, will be reduced by the disassociation between our agency and the act of killing
  • We cannot expect our AI systems to be ethical on our behalf – they won’t be, as they will be designed to kill efficiently, not thoughtfully
  • the Orwellian nightmare realised
  • “AI will continue to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few big monopolies based on the U.S. and China. Most people – and parts of the world – will be worse off.”
  • The remainder of this report is divided into three sections that draw from hundreds of additional respondents’ hopeful and critical observations: 1) concerns about human-AI evolution, 2) suggested solutions to address AI’s impact, and 3) expectations of what life will be like in 2030, including respondents’ positive outlooks on the quality of life and the future of work, health care and education
Ed Webb

Hate spreads in Trump's America: "We need to root out white supremacy just like the can... - 0 views

  • the media won’t give the same time of day or coverage to communities who are being targeted by hate violence. They are spending so much time humanizing white nationalists and humanizing white supremacy that in many ways the news media  routinely ignore the ubiquitous and every day hate that communities of color and other diverse communities experience in this country
  • a majority of white Americans feel they are victims of discrimination. What these white Americans have to do is unpack their own anxiety, discuss this rage, and understand that the project of civil rights, human rights, equality under the law are not an assault on their racial identity. I think for some white voters it is probably about what they perceive as waning demographic and economic power
  • The good news is I learned from my travels around the country that the survivors of hate, people who have lost so much, are not only rebuilding but they are coming forward and they are reclaiming their lives. These survivors are working with allies to stop the hatred, building community defense programs and are willing to engage in difficult conversations with people who see the world differently from them. And I think that is something to really admire. Given what’s transpired survivors of hate have every reason to turn their backs on this country.
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  • There are very real consequences from a white supremacist holding the highest office in the land. There are very real consequences to Trump using the bully pulpit to foster hate on the basis of almost every human characteristic, be it race, faith, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, gender, or class
  • The policies of the Trump administration cannot be divorced from the rhetoric of the Trump administration. The rhetoric and the policies are both driven by xenophobia, Islamaphobia, misogyny and white supremacy. And if the government is going to treat diverse and marginalized communities as subhuman so will everyone else
  • We have to be prepared for much worse from the Trump administration because this is what he has said that he would do all along. It is naïve and foolish of us to think that he is not going to follow through on his promises.
  • It is dystopic. I have met with survivors who have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. One survivor, Tanya Gersh, described to me how she rarely says hello to strangers and is not as gregarious and outgoing as she used to be. She described to me how after she was viciously trolled by white supremacists in Whitefish, Montana. There were something like 700 forms of communication such as emails, social media messages, voice mails. She told me she had to have a conversation with her ten year old about the Holocaust and how every Jewish parent struggles with when to have that conversation with their children about anti-Semitism. Hate crimes that target individuals send a community wide message that its members are not welcome. This undermines feelings of safety and security. It is  called "vicarious trauma." For example the vandalism and arson of house of worship, the targeting of organizations, student groups, campus communities or even state sponsored forms of hate are also designed to terrorize whole communities and groups of people. We also know that hate literally kills people by making communities physically and emotionally sick.
  • There are many victims of hate crimes who out of fear remain silent. Hate crimes are very underreported in America. The stats do not capture the scale of the problem.
  • The War on Terror must stop as well because I don’t think you can separate what the United States does abroad with what it does to its own people — especially nonwhites, Muslims, and other marginalized and discriminated against communities. Justice also involves archiving this moment, documenting what survivors and their communities have experienced
  • there is no one size fits all answer. It should ultimately be determined by the survivors. In my book there are survivors  who forgave the aggressors and culprits in open court and elsewhere because they don’t believe that prison is the answer. There are others who felt otherwise. But overwhelmingly the survivors that I met are open to reconciliation so long as there is accountability
Ed Webb

Feminist Apparel and the Myth of the Woke Brand - Racked - 0 views

  • Let Feminist Apparel be a cautionary tale: Brands don’t have the capacity for ideology beyond capitalism. There’s no such thing as a feminist company, and there never has been.
  • framing for-profit commerce as an act of charity or as a meaningful resistance to evil is no less absurd when someone else does it. Any entity lining its pockets by selling only the aesthetic of political action to those whose lives depend on the results of political action is malevolent and amoral, and it’s a practice in use to varying degrees by an ever-expanding number of companies
  • The politics of any company are bad. They’re not all bad in the same way — they exist on a continuum that extends roughly from “not purposely trying to make anyone’s life worse” to “defense contractor” — but the structure of capitalism means that they all need to pay their employees less than their labor is actually worth and find ways to separate consumers from more money than it actually costs to produce and distribute their product.
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  • Companies accumulate wealth by taking it from people with less power through various means of subterfuge (that we call it marketing is, in and of itself, marketing), which, even on a small scale, is an activity necessarily uninterested in equality. If capitalism could deliver economic parity — if parity was even part of the ideology’s intent, which it’s not — then Latinx women wouldn’t still make 54 cents on a white man’s dollar several hundred years into the American capitalist experiment.
  • Capitalism is an apparatus that convinced a whole culture that then-worthless clear rocks were the only real way to tell a woman you wanted to marry her, so convincing us that buying a T-shirt from a creep (or from union busters, or polluters, or whoever) is the same as being politically active is comparatively light work
  • Even though there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, that doesn’t mean all consumer choices are the same. Companies can’t be feminist, but their leaders can make choices that operate on feminist values, like supporting the unionization of their workforces and providing fair wages and comprehensive health care and family leave to all workers. When possible, taking your business to those companies is an ethically superior choice. Capitalism is a global economic order that’s impossible to opt out of on an individual consumer level, but it’s possible to make some of the individual choices therein with integrity, even if you understand that doing so doesn’t move the dial as political action.
  • the only clear-eyed way to regard a corporation is, at best, as an adversary
Ed Webb

Legendary Lands: Umberto Eco on the Greatest Maps of Imaginary Places and Why They Appe... - 0 views

  • Eco sees in the imaginary a counterintuitive assurance of reality — fictional narratives, in a strange way, is the only place where we can become unmoored from our existential discomfort with uncertainty, for in fiction everything is precisely and unambiguously as it was intended
  • The possible world of narrative is the only universe in which we can be absolutely certain about something, and it gives us a very strong sense of truth. The credulous believe that El Dorado and Lemuria exist or existed somewhere or other, and skeptics are convinced that they never existed, but we all know that it is undeniably certain that Superman is Clark Kent and that Dr. Watson was never Nero Wolfe’s right-hand man, while it is equally certain that Anna Karenina died under a train and that she never married Prince Charming.
Ed Webb

I unintentionally created a biased AI algorithm 25 years ago - tech companies are still... - 0 views

  • How and why do well-educated, well-intentioned scientists produce biased AI systems? Sociological theories of privilege provide one useful lens.
  • Their training data is biased. They are designed by an unrepresentative group. They face the mathematical impossibility of treating all categories equally. They must somehow trade accuracy for fairness. And their biases are hiding behind millions of inscrutable numerical parameters.
  • fairness can still be the victim of competitive pressures in academia and industry. The flawed Bard and Bing chatbots from Google and Microsoft are recent evidence of this grim reality. The commercial necessity of building market share led to the premature release of these systems.
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  • Scientists also face a nasty subconscious dilemma when incorporating diversity into machine learning models: Diverse, inclusive models perform worse than narrow models.
  • biased AI systems can still be created unintentionally and easily. It’s also clear that the bias in these systems can be harmful, hard to detect and even harder to eliminate.
  • with North American computer science doctoral programs graduating only about 23% female, and 3% Black and Latino students, there will continue to be many rooms and many algorithms in which underrepresented groups are not represented at all.
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