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Ed Webb

Surveillant Society - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...surveillant-society

surveillance sousveillance

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The assumption that one is not being recorded in any real way, a standard in civilization for more or less all of history, is being overturned.
  • CEOs have become slaves to the PR department in a bizarre inversion of internal corporate checks and balances
  • “Your word against mine” can be a serious and drawn-out dispute, subject to all kinds of subjective judgments, loyalties, rights, and arguments; “Your word against my high-definition video” gives citizens and the vulnerable a bit more leverage.
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  • The issue of ownership is being muddied by the same process that has upended media industries – the transition of recordable data from physical to virtual property, infinitely copyable but still subject to many of the necessities of more traditionally-held items. Who owns what, who is legally bound to act in which way, which licenses supercede others? A team of lawyers and scholars might spend months putting together a cohesive argument for any number of possibilities. What chance does an end user have to figure out whether or not they have the right to print, distribute, delete, and so on?
  • if you show everything, you’re likely to show something you should have hidden, and if you hide everything, everyone will assume you did so for a reason
  • Hoaxes, fakes, set-ups, staged scenarios, creative editing, post-production, photoshopping, and every other tool of the trade, all show something other than the raw, original product. I’m not familiar with forensic digital media evaluation tools in use today, but I get the feeling that if they’re not inadequate now, they will be so in a few years.
  • our responsibilities as a society to use these new tools judiciously and responsibly
  • increasingly, the answers to these questions are tending towards the “record first” mentality
  • The logical next step, after assuming one is being recorded at all times when in public (potentially true) is ensuring one is being recorded at all times when in public. Theoretically, you won’t act any differently, since you’re already operating under that assumption.
  • how long before it’s considered negligent to have not recorded an accident or criminal act?
  • You have no privacy in public, haven’t had any for a long time, and what little you have you tend to give away. But the sword is double-edged; shouldn’t we benefit from that as well as suffer? A surveillance society is watched. A surveillant society is watching.
Ed Webb

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

www.pewinternet.org/...gence-and-the-future-of-humans

AI dystopia prediction future futures computing

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • 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

THE MACHINE STOPS ... E.M. Forster - 3 views

archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/...forster.html

sci-fi story sciencefiction technology dystopia internet surveillance fiction literature

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14 - Cached
  • like the cell of a bee
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      Why this image?
  • She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      What is the weight of that "in certain directions"?
  • I can give you fully five minutes
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      Does this seem as outrageous today as it must have in Forster's time?
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • wasting my time
  • "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."
  • The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you
  • the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people - an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit.
  • "It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she asserted. "Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"
  • The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      In common with many other dystopian writers, Forster predicts environmental catastrophe.
  • For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      What of this seems familiar?
  • To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age
  • Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      Forster predicts the TED talk?
  • Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience
  • I will not tell you through the Machine
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      Is this due to concern about surveillance, or due to the personal nature of what he wishes to communicate, which needs nuance?
  • thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
  • her horror of direct experience returned. It was not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it smelt - not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did smell, and with her eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her.
  • The man in front dropped his Book - no great matter, but it disquieted them all
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      Why? Is this society not governed by reason?
  • they seemed intolerable
  • When the air-ships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and windows, and the proportionate discomfort to those who were civilized and refined
  • illegal, unmechanical, and punishable by Homelessness
  • People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine
  • "Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas."
  • She might well declare that the visit was superfluous. The buttons, the knobs, the reading-desk with the Book, the temperature, the atmosphere, the illumination - all were exactly the same. And if Kuno himself, flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last, what profit was there in that? She was too well-bred to shake him by the hand.
  • "You think it irreligious of me to have found out a way of my own. It was just what the Committee thought, when they threatened me with Homelessness." At this she grew angry. "I worship nothing!" she cried. "I am most advanced. I don"t think you irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. All the fear and the superstition that existed once have been destroyed by the Machine. I only meant that to find out a way of your own was----Besides, there is no new way out." "So it is always supposed." "Except through the vomitories, for which one must have an Egression-permit, it is impossible to get out. The Book says so." "Well, the Book"s wrong, for I have been out on my feet."
  • Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him
  • Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man"s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong
  • all the food-tubes and medicine-tubes and music- tubes that the Machine has evolved lately
  • Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on
  • I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here
  • There was not room for such a person in the world. And with her pity disgust mingled. She was ashamed at having borne such a son, she who had always been so respectable and so full of ideas
  • Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now
  • I fought till the very end
  • Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation
  • in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. but in practice all, save a few retrogrades, worshipped it as divine
  • No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence
  • Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine
  • mankind was not yet sufficiently adaptable to do without sleeping
  • Under the seas, beneath the roots of the mountains, ran the wires through which they saw and heard, the enormous eyes and ears that were their heritage, and the hum of many workings clothed their thoughts in one garment of subserviency. Only the old and the sick remained ungrateful, for it was rumoured that Euthanasia, too, was out of order, and that pain had reappeared among men
  • there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
       
      How would we respond today if the internet and all media it supports suddenly stopped working? People dial 911 when Facebook goes down...
  • She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her - it did kill many thousands of people outright
  • man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven
  • some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow
  • scraps of the untainted sky
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Aug 14
Ed Webb

Sinclair tells stations to air media-bashing promos - and the criticism goes viral - Ap... - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

propaganda US USA television TV ownership conservatism

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • they're seeing these people they've trusted for decades tell them things they know are essentially propaganda
Ed Webb

CNN produces Gothic horror, and this is a problem | Bryan Alexander - 0 views

bryanalexander.org/...c-horror-and-this-is-a-problem

media CNN TV television gothic horror fear opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Mar 18 - Cached
  • Remember that for *decades* American violent crime has gone steadily down, but most Americans have been convinced we lived under a nightmarish crime siege. CNN plays a key role in that, as I and others have shown. CNN has continuously celebrated violent crime stories far, far out of proportion to their reality.
  • As an information source, CNN helped skew Americans’ sense of reality in terms of violent crime. As things got better, they took exquisite care to make sure we thought they were the opposite. Why does this matter?
  • remember that Trump won in 2016 in part by arguing that America was under siege from violent crime. Who do you think convinced about 1/4th of American voters of this idea?  Social media played some role, which is in the public eye now, but tv’s huge role is underappreciated
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  • A key driver for gun ownership is self defense. CNN teaches viewers that they live in a dangerous hellscape, with terror about to attack at any moment.  Put another way, CNN is the NRA’s best secret friend
  • I think if CNN is truly possessed of world class storytellers, they could turn heart disease into a gripping narrative.  (Might I recommend a certain book on the subject?)  They could also choose not to flog a relative handful of crime stories into a national terror wave.  Instead they very carefully selected the violent crime horror route.
  • This is Gothic puffery, a deliberate act of fearmongering, with consequences. And we’re not holding CNN and its ilk accountable.  It’s time we should.
Ed Webb

Could fully automated luxury communism ever work? - 0 views

www.huckmag.com/...ted-luxury-communism-ever-work

futures technology opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Jul 19 - Cached
  • Having achieved a seamless, pervasive commodification of online sociality, Big Tech companies have turned their attention to infrastructure. Attempts by Google, Amazon and Facebook to achieve market leadership, in everything from AI to space exploration, risk a future defined by the battle for corporate monopoly.
  • The technologies are coming. They’re already here in certain instances. It’s the politics that surrounds them. We have alternatives: we can have public ownership of data in the citizen’s interest or it could be used as it is in China where you have a synthesis of corporate and state power
  • the two alternatives that big data allows is an all-consuming surveillance state where you have a deep synthesis of capitalism with authoritarian control, or a reinvigorated welfare state where more and more things are available to everyone for free or very low cost
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  • we can’t begin those discussions until we say, as a society, we want to at least try subordinating these potentials to the democratic project, rather than allow capitalism to do what it wants
  • I say in FALC that this isn’t a blueprint for utopia. All I’m saying is that there is a possibility for the end of scarcity, the end of work, a coming together of leisure and labour, physical and mental work. What do we want to do with it? It’s perfectly possible something different could emerge where you have this aggressive form of social value.
  • I think the thing that’s been beaten out of everyone since 2010 is one of the prevailing tenets of neoliberalism: work hard, you can be whatever you want to be, that you’ll get a job, be well paid and enjoy yourself.  In 2010, that disappeared overnight, the rules of the game changed. For the status quo to continue to administer itself,  it had to change common sense. You see this with Jordan Peterson; he’s saying you have to know your place and that’s what will make you happy. To me that’s the only future for conservative thought, how else do you mediate the inequality and unhappiness?
  • I don’t think we can rapidly decarbonise our economies without working people understanding that it’s in their self-interest. A green economy means better quality of life. It means more work. Luxury populism feeds not only into the green transition, but the rollout of Universal Basic Services and even further.
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