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Ed Webb

Babies treat 'social robots' as sentient beings | KurzweilAI - 1 views

  • UW researchers hypothesized that babies would be more likely to view the robot as a psychological being if they saw other friendly human beings socially interacting with it. “Babies look to us for guidance in how to interpret things, and if we treat something as a psychological agent, they will, too,” Meltzoff said. “Even more remarkably, they will learn from it, because social interaction unlocks the key to early learning.”
  • “The study suggests that if you want to build a companion robot, it is not sufficient to make it look human,” said Rao. “The robot must also be able to interact socially with humans, an interesting challenge for robotics.”
Ed Webb

Look Closely, Doctor - See the Camera? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a delusion is just a delusion, psychosis is psychosis, and the scenery is incidental
  • Some experts studying conditions like Truman Show delusion and other culture-bound delusions, which are specific to a time or place, are questioning the premise that culture is only incidental to psychosis, even as a growing body of evidence has pointed to brain abnormalities and other biological causes for illnesses like schizophrenia.
  • Another patient traveled to New York City and showed up at a federal building in downtown Manhattan seeking asylum so he could get off his reality show, Dr. Gold said. The patient reported that he also came to New York to see if the Twin Towers were still standing, because he believed that seeing their destruction on Sept. 11 on television was part of his reality show. If they were still standing, he said, then he would know that the terrorist attack was all part of the script
Ed Webb

Glenn Greenwald: How America's Surveillance State Breeds Conformity and Fear | Civil Li... - 0 views

  • The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it, it deters it and kills it.  That’s its intent. It does that by design.
  • the realization quickly emerged that, allowing government officials to eavesdrop on other people, on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that gives so much authority and leverage to those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power.  That’s how potent of a power it is.
  • If a dictator takes over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.
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  • Now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the National Security State and its close cousin, the Surveillance State, with nothing short of veneration.
  • The NSA, beginning 2001, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful ways, such that it is now an enormous part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI
  • Now, the Patriot Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every three years with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.
  • hey are two, as I said, established Democrats warning that the Democratic control of the Executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad Patriot Act. And one of the things they are trying to do is extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is they’re doing in terms of the surveillance on the American people.  Because even though they are on the Intelligence Committee, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does including even how many Americans have had their e-mails read or had their telephone calls intercepted by the NSA.
  • "We can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their e-mails read by us, and their telephone calls listened in by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens."
  • An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance and this is what it said: “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched. All of us, almost everywhere.” There is a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million cameras -- surveillance cameras -- in the United States within five years largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveilling. 
  • it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance, but just as menacingly, corporations, private corporations, engage in huge amounts of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment of where we are physically, and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant.  Obviously, credit card and banking transactions are reported, and tell anyone who wants to know everything we do. We talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program that was not really a government eavesdropping program, so much as it was a private industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and the other telecom giants. In fact, when you talk about the American Surveillance State, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the Surveillance State is
  • The principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just for international between foreign nations but by America citizens on American soils that is beyond the reach of the U.S. government.
  • at exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing
  • government now operates with complete secrecy, and we have none
  • it makes people believe that they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do
  • what has happened in the last three to four years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into United States policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to foreign soil to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals like Guantanamo, Congress last year enacted, and President Obama signed, the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the detention -- without trial, indefinitely -- of American citizens on U.S. soil.
  • this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do.  It’s justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves [dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was originally the war on terror powers.
  • if the government is able to know what we speak about and know who we’re talking to, know what it is that we’re planning, it makes any kind of activism extremely difficult. Because secrecy and privacy are prerequisites to effective actions.
  • we are training our young citizens to live in a culture where the expect they are always being watched. And we want them to be chilled, we want them to be deterred, we want them not to ever challenge orthodoxy or to explore limits where engaging creativity in any kind. This type of surveillance, by design, breeds conformism.  That’s its purpose. that’s what makes surveillance so pernicious.
  • f you go and speak to communities of American Muslims is you find an incredibly pervasive climate of fear.
  • This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways
  • governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people who they think their citizens won’t care very much about, because they’ll think they’re not affected by it
  • the psychological effects on East German people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they need to transgress.
  • Rosa Luxembourg said, “He who does not move does not notice his chains.”
  • You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this Surveillance State does, by training people  to accept their own conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.
  • important means of subverting this one-way mirror that I’ve described is forcible, radical transparency. It’s one of the reasons I support, so enthusiastically and unqualafiably, groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks. I want holes to be blown in the wall of secrecy.
  • There are things like the Tor project and other groups that enable people to use the internet without any detection from government authorities. That has the effect of preventing regimes that actually bar their citizens from using the Internet from doing so since you can no longer trace the origins of the Internet user. But it also protects people who live in countries like ours where the government is trying to constantly monitor what we do by sending our communications through multiple proxies around the world that can’t be invaded. There’s really a war taking place: an arms race where the government and these groups are attempting to stay one tactical step ahead of the other. In terms of ability to shield internet communications from the government and the government’s ability to invade them and participating in this war in ways that are supportive of the “good side” are really critical as is veiling yourself from the technology that exists, to make what you do as tight as possible.
Ed Webb

Would You Protect Your Computer's Feelings? Clifford Nass Says Yes. - ProfHacker - The ... - 0 views

  • The Man Who Lied to His Laptop condenses for a popular audience an argument that Nass has been making for at least 15 years: humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.
  • At first blush, this sounds absurd. Everyone knows that it's "just a computer," and of course computers don't have feelings. And yet. Nass has a slew of amusing stories—and, crucially, studies based on those stories—indicating that, no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares. For example: In one study, users reviewed a software package, either on the same computer they'd used it on, or on a different computer. Consistently, participants gave the software better ratings when they reviewed in on the same computer—as if they didn't want the computer to feel bad. What's more, Nass notes, "every one of the participants insisted that she or he would never bother being polite to a computer" (7).
  • Nass found that users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless. In fact, they liked it as much as the same program, if they were told the praise was accurate. (In other words, flattery was as well received as praise, and both were preferred to no positive comments.) Again, when questioned about the results, users angrily denied any difference at all in their reactions.
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    How do you interact with the computing devices in your life?
Ed Webb

Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields - 0 views

  • David Barash, Evolutionary Psychologist, University of Washington: I am hard-pressed to identify any sci-fi works that make use of evolutionary psychology directly, or even that fit neatly into its scientific world-view. Some possibilities include those books that have made use of the concept of selective breeding for particular behavioral inclinations: Dune comes to mind, and of course, before that, Brave New World. Although evo-psych presumes genetic influence on behavior, it definitely doesn't imply anything like the genetic determinism found in either of these. In that sense, these books are more like a mis-use of evo-psych, likely to confirm the worst fears of readers who don't understand the science itself. Another case of this would be Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which derived from the author's mis-reading of what was then called sociobiology - specifically, her assumption that a science that examined male-female differences (among other things) was also prescribing and exaggerating these differences.
Ed Webb

Chez Pazienza: The Death of Privacy and the Death of Tyler Clementi - 0 views

  • digital age technology, which now allows for the psychological torment that used to be confined only to school to be relentless and omnipresent
  • They felt like they could do it because everybody does it. A good portion of our media culture is now based on prurient voyeurism and a constant invasion of privacy. The public disclosure of a person's most intimate secrets and moments is no longer considered shameful or condemnable -- it's just called entertainment. Why wouldn't a couple of college kids turn their classmate into an unwitting reality TV star? It's basically the same toxic horseshit they grew up watching on MTV, VH1 and E! For all they knew, maybe Tyler Clementi would've loved the mainline of notoriety. If the dipshits on Jersey Shore don't have a problem mining their most repugnant traits in the name of 15 minutes of fame -- if anyone can go to YouTube and post video of a guy complaining about how there are rapists in his neighborhood and suddenly turn that guy into a viral sensation and his complaints into a catch phrase -- why the hell can't two Rutgers freshmen live-stream a roommate in bed with a man? This is the age of the unauthorized sex tape. This is Bentham's Panopticon come to fruition on a global scale. You're always being watched. You're always on camera. You have no expectation of privacy. Clementi should have known that, right?!
  • anyone he personally feels deserves it and he and his website are at the forefront of America's culture of shameless voyeurism and a constant, irrepressible invasion of privacy. It's because someone like Perez Hilton has spent the past few years making himself rich by indiscriminately circulating images of Miley Cyrus's crotch to the world that the two teenagers who tortured Tyler Clementi likely didn't think that what they were doing was a big deal.
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

A woman first wrote the prescient ideas Huxley and Orwell made famous - Quartzy - 1 views

  • In 1919, a British writer named Rose Macaulay published What Not, a novel about a dystopian future—a brave new world if you will—where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state.You’ve probably never heard of Macaulay or What Not. However, Aldous Huxley, author of the science fiction classic Brave New World, hung out in the same London literary circles as her and his 1932 book contains many concepts that Macaulay first introduced in her work. In 2019, you’ll be able to read Macaulay’s book yourself and compare the texts as the British publisher Handheld Press is planning to re- release the forgotten novel in March. It’s been out of print since the year it was first released.
  • The resurfacing of What Not also makes this a prime time to consider another work that influenced Huxley’s Brave New World, the 1923 novel We by Yvgeny Zamyatin. What Not and We are lost classics about a future that foreshadows our present. Notably, they are also hidden influences on some of the most significant works of 20th century fiction, Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.
  • In Macaulay’s book—which is a hoot and well worth reading—a democratically elected British government has been replaced with a “United Council, five minds with but a single thought—if that,” as she put it. Huxley’s Brave New World is run by a similarly small group of elites known as “World Controllers.”
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  • citizens of What Not are ranked based on their intelligence from A to C3 and can’t marry or procreate with someone of the same rank to ensure that intelligence is evenly distributed
  • Brave New World is more futuristic and preoccupied with technology than What Not. In Huxley’s world, procreation and education have become completely mechanized and emotions are strictly regulated pharmaceutically. Macaulay’s Britain is just the beginning of this process, and its characters are not yet completely indoctrinated into the new ways of the state—they resist it intellectually and question its endeavors, like the newly-passed Mental Progress Act. She writes:He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too.
  • Where Huxley pairs dumb but pretty and “pneumatic” ladies with intelligent gentlemen, Macaulay’s work is decidedly less sexist.
  • We was published in French, Dutch, and German. An English version was printed and sold only in the US. When Orwell wrote about We in 1946, it was only because he’d managed to borrow a hard-to-find French translation.
  • While Orwell never indicated that he read Macaulay, he shares her subversive and subtle linguistic skills and satirical sense. His protagonist, Winston—like Kitty—works for the government in its Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue in Newspeak, where he rewrites historical records to support whatever Big Brother currently says is good for the regime. Macaulay would no doubt have approved of Orwell’s wit. And his state ministries bear a striking similarity to those she wrote about in What Not.
  • Orwell was familiar with Huxley’s novel and gave it much thought before writing his own blockbuster. Indeed, in 1946, before the release of 1984, he wrote a review of Zamyatin’s We (pdf), comparing the Russian novel with Huxley’s book. Orwell declared Huxley’s text derivative, writing in his review of We in The Tribune:The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.
  • In We, the story is told by D-503, a male engineer, while in Brave New World we follow Bernard Marx, a protagonist with a proper name. Both characters live in artificial worlds, separated from nature, and they recoil when they first encounter people who exist outside of the state’s constructed and controlled cities.
  • Although We is barely known compared to Orwell and Huxley’s later works, I’d argue that it’s among the best literary science fictions of all time, and it’s highly relevant, as it was when first written. Noam Chomsky calls it “more perceptive” than both 1984 and Brave New World. Zamyatin’s futuristic society was so on point, he was exiled from the Soviet Union because it was such an accurate description of life in a totalitarian regime, though he wrote it before Stalin took power.
  • Macaulay’s work is more subtle and funny than Huxley’s. Despite being a century old, What Not is remarkably relevant and readable, a satire that only highlights how little has changed in the years since its publication and how dangerous and absurd state policies can be. In this sense then, What Not reads more like George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 
  • Orwell was critical of Zamyatin’s technique. “[We] has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize,” he wrote. Still, he admired the work as a whole. “[Its] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—[…] makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s,”
  • Like our own tech magnates and nations, the United State of We is obsessed with going to space.
  • Perhaps in 2019 Macaulay’s What Not, a clever and subversive book, will finally get its overdue recognition.
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