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Steve Bosserman

Chris Hedges With Mark Crispin Miller on the Destruction of an Independent Press - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...uction-of-an-independent-press

mainstream media independent press streamlining

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Hedges calls attention to the algorithms of Facebook, Google and Twitter, and how they steer traffic away from anti-war and progressive websites, while Miller speaks of the frightening historical precedent of the homogenization of the press. "I think what we have seen over the decades since the mid-'70s, and I'm going to make a provocative comparison here, is something analogous to what the Nazis called gleichschaltung, which means streamlining," Miller says. "When they came to power, they made it their business to make sure that not only all media outlets but all industries, all sectors of the culture, would be streamlined, which meant getting rid of anyone who was not fully on board with the Nazi program."
Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Steve Bosserman

Google and corporate news giants forge new alliance - 0 views

nexusnewsfeed.com/...news-giants-forge-new-alliance

independent press algorithms streamlining mainstream media

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”
  • Last April, Google clamped down on alternative media with new structural changes to its algorithms — accompanying the change with an announcement tarring alternative media with the broad black brush of “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories” as opposed to what it called “authoritative content.”As a result, organic search-engine traffic to these sites uniformly plummeted to less than half of what it had previously been, devastating many publishers.
  • The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”This new model overwhelmingly favors those who see information and journalism as an article of commerce alone. It poses a stark threat not only to internet users’ ability to access information, but to the ability of citizens and social movements that hope to interact with, participate in, and wield influence over the political and economic activities that determine our lives and the fate of communities across the world.
Steve Bosserman

Opinion | It's Westworld. What's Wrong With Cruelty to Robots? - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...conscious-robots-morality.html

ethics robotics human behavior morality artificial intelligence

shared by Steve Bosserman on 23 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • The biggest concern is that we might one day create conscious machines: sentient beings with beliefs, desires and, most morally pressing, the capacity to suffer. Nothing seems to be stopping us from doing this. Philosophers and scientists remain uncertain about how consciousness emerges from the material world, but few doubt that it does. This suggests that the creation of conscious machines is possible.
  • If we did create conscious beings, conventional morality tells us that it would be wrong to harm them — precisely to the degree that they are conscious, and can suffer or be deprived of happiness. Just as it would be wrong to breed animals for the sake of torturing them, or to have children only to enslave them, it would be wrong to mistreat the conscious machines of the future.
  • Anything that looks and acts like the hosts on “Westworld” will appear conscious to us, whether or not we understand how consciousness emerges in physical systems. Indeed, experiments with AI and robotics have already shown how quick we are to attribute feelings to machines that look and behave like independent agents.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is where actually watching “Westworld” matters. The pleasure of entertainment aside, the makers of the series have produced a powerful work of philosophy. It’s one thing to sit in a seminar and argue about what it would mean, morally, if robots were conscious. It’s quite another to witness the torments of such creatures, as portrayed by actors such as Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton. You may still raise the question intellectually, but in your heart and your gut, you already know the answer.
  • But the prospect of building a place like “Westworld” is much more troubling, because the experience of harming a host isn’t merely similar to that of harming a person; it’s identical. We have no idea what repeatedly indulging such fantasies would do to us, ethically or psychologically — but there seems little reason to think that it would be good.
  • For the first time in our history, then, we run the risk of building machines that only monsters would use as they please.
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