Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or urlThe enemy between us: how inequality erodes our mental health | openDemocracy - 1 views
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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.
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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
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An epidemic of distress seems to be gripping some of the richest nations in the world
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America's Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral - HISTORY - 0 views
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the “American Plan.” From the 1910s through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of American women were detained and forcibly examined for STIs. The program was modeled after similar ones in Europe, under which authorities stalked “suspicious” women, arresting, testing and imprisoning them.
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If the women tested positive, U.S. officials locked them away in penal institutions with no due process. While many records of the program have since been lost or destroyed, women’s forced internment could range from a few days to many months. Inside these institutions, records show, the women were often injected with mercury and forced to ingest arsenic-based drugs, the most common treatments for syphilis in the early part of the century. If they misbehaved, or if they failed to show “proper” ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement—or even sterilized.
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beginning in 1918, federal officials began pushing every state in the nation to pass a “model law,” which enabled officials to forcibly examine any person “reasonably suspected” of having an STI. Under this statute, those who tested positive for an STI could be held in detention for as long as it took to render him or her noninfectious. (On paper, the law was gender-neutral; in practice, it almost exclusively focused on regulating women and their bodies.)
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The Coronavirus and Our Future | The New Yorker - 0 views
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I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly.
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the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.
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The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.
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AI Causes Real Harm. Let's Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype - Scientific American - 0 views
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Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.
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Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.
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Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”
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Look Closely, Doctor - See the Camera? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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a delusion is just a delusion, psychosis is psychosis, and the scenery is incidental
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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.
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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
Americans on the future of science and technology: meh | Bryan Alexander - 2 views
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our expectations are generally unexcited and restrained. The bold imagination of 20th-century American visions seems to have gone for a nap. As Smithsonian’s article notes, “Most Americans view the technology- driven future with a sense of hope. They just don’t want to live there.” We’re actually less excited than that
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When it comes to specific emerging technologies we often greet them with broad, deep skepticism and fear, including human genetic engineering, robotics, drones, and wearable computing: 66% think it would be a change for the worse if prospective parents could alter the DNA of their children to produce smarter, healthier, or more athletic offspring. 65% think it would be a change for the worse if lifelike robots become the primary caregivers for the elderly and people in poor health. 63% think it would be a change for the worse if personal and commercial drones are given permission to fly through most U.S. airspace. 53% of Americans think it would be a change for the worse if most people wear implants or other devices that constantly show them information about the world around them. (emphases in original)
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The heroic days of NASA in the popular imagination are long flown: “One in three (33%) expect that humans will have colonized planets other than Earth.” Indeed. a few more Americans actually see teleportation happening.
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Embryos involving the genes of animals mixed with humans have been produced secretively for the past three years | Mail Online - 0 views
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‘The problem with many scientists is that they want to do things because they want to experiment. That is not a good enough rationale.’
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‘The reason for doing these experiments is to understand more about early human development and come up with ways of curing serious diseases, and as a scientist I feel there is a moral imperative to pursue this research.
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Human-animal hybrids are also created in other countries, many of which have little or no regulation.
Shareable: The Exterminator's Want-Ad - 1 views
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So, this moldy jail I was in was this old dot-com McMansion, out in the Permanent Foreclosure Zone in the dead suburbs. That's where they cooped us up. This gated community was built for some vanished rich people. That was their low-intensity prison for us rehab detainees.
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This place outside was a Beltway suburb before Washington was abandoned. The big hurricane ran right over it, and crushed it down pretty good, so now it was a big green hippie jungle. Our prison McMansion had termites, roaches, mold and fleas, but once it was a nice house. This rambling wreck of a town was half storm-debris. All the lawns were replaced with wet, weedy, towering patches of bamboo, or marijuana -- or hops, or kenaf, whatever (I never could tell those farm crops apart). The same goes for the "garden roofs," which were dirt piled on top of the dirty houses. There were smelly goats running loose, chickens cackling. Salvaged umbrellas and chairs toppled in the empty streets. No traffic signs, because there were no cars.
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The rich elite just blew it totally. They dropped their globalized ball. They panicked. So they're in jail, like I was. Or they're in exile somewhere, or else they jumped out of penthouses screaming when the hyperinflation ate them alive.
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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans | Pew Research Center - 0 views
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experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities
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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.
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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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Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends? | The New Yorker - 0 views
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There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.
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education, which they believe is a form of domestication
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there is no moral dimension to this economic analysis: utility is a fundamentally amoral concept
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Feminist Apparel and the Myth of the Woke Brand - Racked - 0 views
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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.
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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
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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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Hayabusa2 and the unfolding future of space exploration | Bryan Alexander - 0 views
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What might this tell us about the future? Let’s consider Ryugu as a datapoint or story for where space exploration might head next.
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robots continue to be cheap, far easier to operate, capable of enduring awful stresses, and happy to send gorgeous data back our way
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Hayabusa is a Japanese project, not an American one, and national interest counts for a lot. No humans were involved, so human interest and story are absent. Perhaps the whole project looks too science-y for a culture that spins into post-truthiness, contains some serious anti-science and anti-technology strands, or just finds science stories too dry. Or maybe the American media outlets think Americans just aren’t that into space in particular in 2018.
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Wealthy L.A. Schools' Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan's - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Indigenous Futurism idea: Native peoples returning to urbanized areas and helping the land reclaim them after settlers all die of a perfectly preventable pandemic. https://t.co/omCB8u0QBX
The migrant caravan "invasion" and America's epistemic crisis - Vox - 0 views
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The intensity of belief on the right has begun to vary inversely with plausibility. Precisely because the “threat” posed by the caravan is facially absurd, believing in it — performing belief in it — is a powerful act of shared identity reinforcement, of tribal solidarity.
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Once that support system is in place, Trump is unbound, free to impose his fantasies on reality. He can campaign on Republicans protecting people with preexisting conditions even as the GOP sues to block such protections. He can brush off Mueller’s revelations and fire anyone who might threaten him. He can use imaginary Democratic voter fraud to cover up red-state voter suppression. He can use antifa as a pretext for deploying troops domestically.
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Trump does not view himself as president of the whole country. He views himself as president of his white nationalist party — their leader in a war on liberals. He has all the tools of a head of state with which to prosecute that war. Currently, he is restrained only by the lingering professionalism of public servants and a few thin threads of institutional inertia.
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