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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
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-next-great-computing-platform

crispr dna genetics biology

shared by Steve Bosserman on 06 May 18 - No Cached
  • Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering. And Inscripta, which wants to be the Apple. And Twist Bioscience, which could be the Intel
  • They’re betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language.
  • “Being able to do that in a parallel way is the novel part,” says Paul Dabrowski, who estimates that Synthego cuts down the time it takes for a scientists to perform gene edits from several months to just one.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • his company’s first move was to release a different gene-editing enzyme called MAD7—you can think of it like a Crispr/Cas9 knockoff, but legal—free for R&D uses. Inscripta will charge a single-digit royalty, far below market standards, to use MAD7 in manufacturing products or therapeutics.
  • We’re trying to get more people into the game now, by democratizing access to this family of enzymes,” he says. It’s a page from the Steve Jobs playbook; get them hooked on the MADzyme platform, down the line sell them personal hardware.
Bill Fulkerson

Millennials Are Done with US Domination of World Affairs | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...-domination-world-affairs.html

millennials capitalism world

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 18
     
    "As readers know, I'm very dubious about assigning agency to generational cohorts like "Millennials," or "Boomers." Where, after all, are their offices on K Street? And if the Powers That Be need to find enough "Millennials" willing to help them continue their project of world domination, that they will do. However, it does seem that the the series of military debacles following the invasion of Iraq has dented our sense of American Exceptionalism, and has begun to shape public opinion - for the better, so far as I am concerned. A cautionary note would be "Millennial" support for globalization (which has, after all, brought us the iPhone, along with the figure of the selfie-taking backpacker). If I were a nimble 1%-er, I'd be perfectly happy to discard American Exceptionalism as an ideology, as long as I could control the global supply chain (and had a high-altitude, remote pied-a-terre from which to manage the free movement of my capital)."
Bill Fulkerson

The 'Radical' Left's Agenda Is More Popular Than the GOP's - 0 views

nymag.com/...ore-popular-than-the-gops.html

radical gop

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 03 Aug 18
     
    " The inequitable distribution of wealth, political knowledge, and free time in the United States gives wealthy individuals and corporations a leg up on ordinary Americans in the fight to influence public policy. But ordinary Americans have strength in numbers. And as DFP's polling suggests, there are no small number of progressive economic policies that a large majority of working people (from a wide array of regions, religious backgrounds, and ethnic groups) are ready to rally around. The trick is building institutions - and cultivating political leaders - that are willing and able to get that rally started."
Steve Bosserman

For better AI, diversify the people building it - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...versify-the-people-building-it

diversity artificial intelligence

shared by Steve Bosserman on 31 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Lyons announced the Partnership on AI’s first three working groups, which are dedicated to fair, transparent, and accountable AI; safety-critical AI; and AI, labor, and the economy. Each group will have a for-profit and nonprofit chair and aim to share its results as widely as possible. Lyons says these groups will be like a “union of concerned scientists.” “A big part of this is on us to really achieve inclusivity,” she says. Tess Posner, the executive director of AI4ALL, a nonprofit that runs summer programs teaching AI to students from underrepresented groups, showed why training a diverse group for the next generation of AI workers is essential. Currently, only 13 percent of AI companies have female CEOs, and less than 3 percent of tenure-track engineering faculty in the US are black. Yet an inclusive workforce may have more ideas and can spot problems with systems before they happen, and diversity can improve the bottom line. Posner pointed out a recent Intel report saying diversity could add $500 billion to the US economy.
  • “It’s good for business,” she says. These weren’t the first presentations at EmTech Digital by women with ideas on fixing AI. On Monday, Microsoft researcher Timnit Gebru presented examples of bias in current AI systems, and earlier on Tuesday Fast.ai cofounder Rachel Thomas talked about her company’s free deep-learning course and its effort to diversify the overall AI workforce. Even with the current problems achieving diversity, there are more women and people of color that could be brou
  • ght into the workforce.
Steve Bosserman

Here's How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mp-election-not-just-fake-news

social media conversation coverage politics elections

shared by Steve Bosserman on 21 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president. “He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says. Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.
Steve Bosserman

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious - Samir Chopra | Aeon E... - 0 views

aeon.co/...-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious

intellectual property

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A general term is useful only if it subsumes related concepts in such a way that semantic value is added. If our comprehension is not increased by our chosen generalised term, then we shouldn’t use it. A common claim such as ‘they stole my intellectual property’ is singularly uninformative, since the general term ‘intellectual property’ obscures more than it illuminates. If copyright infringement is alleged, we try to identify the copyrightable concrete expression, the nature of the infringement and so on. If patent infringement is alleged, we check another set of conditions (does the ‘new’ invention replicate the design of the older one?), and so on for trademarks (does the offending symbol substantially and misleadingly resemble the protected trademark?) and trade secrets (did the enterprise attempt to keep supposedly protected information secret?) The use of the general term ‘intellectual property’ tells us precisely nothing.
  • Property is a legally constructed, historically contingent, social fact. It is founded on economic and social imperatives to distribute and manage material resources – and, thus, wealth and power. As the preface to a legal textbook puts it, legal systems of property ‘confer benefits and impose burdens’ on owners and nonowners respectively. Law defines property. It circumscribes the conditions under which legal subjects may acquire, and properly use and dispose of their property and that of others. It makes concrete the ‘natural right’ of holding property. Different sets of rules create systems with varying allocations of power for owners and others. Some grants of property rights lock in, preserve and reinforce existing relations of race, class or gender, stratifying society and creating new, entrenched, propertied classes. Law makes property part of our socially constructed reality, reconfigurable if social needs change.
  • ‘Property’ is a legal term with overwhelming emotive, expressive and rhetorical impact. It is regarded as the foundation of a culture and as the foundation of an economic system. It pervades our moral sense, our normative order. It has ideological weight and propaganda value. To use the term ‘intellectual property’ is to partake of property’s expressive impact in an economic and political order constructed by property’s legal rights. It is to suggest that if property is at play, then it can be stolen, and therefore must be protected with the same zeal that the homeowner guards her home against invaders and thieves.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What about the common objection that without ‘intellectual property’ the proverbial starving artist would be at the mercy of giant corporations, who have existing market share and first-mover advantage? It is important to disaggregate the necessity and desirability of the protections of the various legal regimes of copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets from that of the language of ‘intellectual property’. Current copyright, patent, trade-secret and trademark law do not need to be completely rejected. Their aims are rather more modest: the reconfiguration of legal rules and protections in an economy and culture in which the nature of creative goods and how they are made, used, shared, modified and distributed has changed. Such advocacy is not against, for instance, copyright protections. Indeed, in the domain of free and open-source software, it is copyright law – through the use of artfully configured software licences that do not restrain users in the way that traditional proprietary software licences do – that protects developers and users. And neither do copyright reformers argue that plagiarists be somehow rewarded; they do not advocate that anyone should be able to take a copyrighted work, put their name on it, and sell it.
  • This public domain is ours to draw upon for future use. The granting of temporary leases to various landlords to extract monopoly rent should be recognised for what it is: a limited privilege for our benefit. The use of ‘intellectual property’ is a rhetorical move by one partner in this conversation, the one owning the supposed ‘property right’. There is no need for us to play along, to confuse one kind of property with another or, for that matter, to even consider the latter kind of object any kind of property at all. Doing so will not dismantle the elaborate structures of rules we have built in order to incentivise artistic and scientific work. Rather, it will make it possible for that work to continue.
Steve Bosserman

The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...al-divide-screens-schools.html

technology education digital divide mobile devices classroom

shared by Steve Bosserman on 29 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.
Steve Bosserman

Want a more equal society? Universal Basic Income might not be the policy you are looki... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ncome-might-not-policy-looking

universal basic income

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • Those who seek a radical departure from capitalism see UBI as part of a radical platform to move away from a world in which work is central to our lives, identities and economies. In their book Inventing the Future, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek argue that UBI is a fundamental part of delivering a new economy in which citizens have much greater freedom over when and if they work.
  • What this shows is that for UBI to be a viable proposition at these levels, there would need to be a fundamental transformation in the ownership of the economy. Williams and Srnicek acknowledge this, arguing that UBI will only work in combination with large scale and collectively owned automation, a reduction in the working week and a shift in social attitudes around the value of the ‘work ethic’.
  • Action on relative poverty is important, and inequality is not cost free. As Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson show in their book ‘The Spirit Level’, countries with higher rates of inequality perform worse against a range of social outcomes – physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • However, unless we are to engage in a radical economic transformation which drastically increases common ownership of economy, it is unlikely that Universal Basic Income on its own will do more than lock us into our current predicament. In the meantime, we need to look for equally radical policies which make a much more material difference to the lives of those on low incomes and who suffer from structural inequalities. Proponents of UBI need to go big or go home.
Steve Bosserman

Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501104

democracy urban design ecosystems diversity neighborhoods

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
  • I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
  • Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Reduced to a word, Jacobs’s argument is that a city, or neighborhood, or block, cannot succeed without diversity: diversity of residential and commercial use, racial and socioeconomic diversity, diversity of governing bodies (from local wards to state agencies), diverse modes of transportation, diversity of public and private institutional support, diversity of architectural style. Great numbers of people concentrated in relatively small areas should not be considered a health or safety hazard; they are the foundation of a healthy community. Dense, varied populations are “desirable,” Jacobs wrote,
  • Madison argued that as you increase the “variety of parties and interests” contained within a republic, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
  • “We need all kinds of diversity,” Jacobs concluded in Death and Life, “so the people of cities can sustain (and further develop) their society and civilization.”
  • In her comparative study of fallen empires, Jacobs identifies common early indicators of decline: “cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.
  • In the foreword to the 1992 Modern Library edition of Death and Life, Jacobs likens cities to natural ecosystems. “Both types of ecosystems,” she writes, “require much diversity to sustain themselves … and because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.”
Steve Bosserman

Toward Democratic, Lawful Citizenship for AIs, Robots, and Corporations - 0 views

blog.singularitynet.io/-and-corporations-cf70345bd009

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • If an AI canread the laws of a country (its Constitution and then relevant portions of the legal code)answer common-sense questions about these lawswhen presented with textual descriptions or videos of real-life situations, explain roughly what the laws imply about these situationsthen this AI has the level of understanding needed to manage the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
  • AI citizens would also presumably have responsibilities similar to those of human citizens, though perhaps with appropriate variations. Clearly, AI citizens would have tax obligations (and corporations already pay taxes, obviously, even though they are not considered autonomous citizens). If they also served on jury duty, this could be interesting, as they might provide a quite different perspective to human citizens. There is a great deal to be fleshed out here.
  • The question becomes: What kind of test can we give to validate that the AI really understands the Constitution, as opposed to just parroting back answers in a shallow but accurate way?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So we can say that passing a well-crafted AI Citizenship Test would bea sufficient condition for possessing a high level of human-like general intelligenceNOT a necessary condition for possessing a high level of general intelligence; nor even a necessary condition for possessing a high level of human-like general intelligenceNOT a sufficient condition for possessing precisely human-like intelligence (as required by the Turing Test or other similar tests)These limitations, however, do not make the notion of an AI Citizenship less interesting; in a way, they make it more interesting. What they tell us is: An AI Citizenship Test will be a specific type of general intelligence test that is specifically relevant to key aspects of modern society.
  • If you would like to voice your perspectives on the AI Citizenship Test, please feel free to participate here.
Steve Bosserman

A California Court Just Ruled That Gig Workers Are Bona Fide Employees. Will Courts in ... - 0 views

psmag.com/...ig-workers-moves-to-the-states

employment gig economy independent contractors

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • The court ruled in favor of the Dynamex drivers, agreeing that they had been misclassified as independent contractors and are, in fact, employees. The ruling also concluded that employers could only classify as independent contractors those workers who meet the conditions laid out in the "ABC standard" established in other states:(a) that the worker is free from control and direction over performance of the work, both under the contract and in fact; (b) that the work provided is outside the usual course of the business for which the work is performed; and (c) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business (hence the ABC standard).
  • While some of these workers may be independent contractors by choice, others, like the Dynamex drivers, were forced into the classification by employers looking to save money. The National Employment Law Project estimates that employers can reduce payroll and other taxes by up to 30 percent by re-classifying employees. State-level studies on the issue, meanwhile, have uncovered extremely high misclassification rates—a series of audits in Ohio found that 47 percent of workers were misclassified. (This misclassification, not surprisingly, costs federal, state, and local governments hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tax revenues.)
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