Group items tagged

"Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said: "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.""

"The internet is primarily funded by the collection, analysis, and trade of data-the data economy. Much of that data is personal data-data about you. The trading of personal data as a business model is increasingly being exported to all institutions in society-the surveillance society, or surveillance capitalism."

"Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden says that tech workers need to think long and hard about how their labor is used by companies to amass power, surveil people, and fundamentally change society, and need to think about whether it is ethical to work at tech companies at all."

"In combining these factors, we arrive at a civilization built upon a technological infrastructure that we fundamentally cannot understand. The same systems that promise us technological emancipation put the whole of society at risk. I vaguely recall a wise man once saying that only the fool builds his house upon sand. And so, how can a society maintain itself if the stones of its foundation are black boxes? Before we answer this question, let's examine the current state of affairs."

Great article - that gets to the heart of the ITGS syllabus...

"The platformization of labor affects workers of all kinds, across platforms. On "click farm" platforms in Brazil, workers perform countless fragmented data tasks. They spend hours every day clicking, following, and commenting on social media accounts - and earning less than a penny for each task."

"The independent review on equity in medical devices once again highlights the multiple ways in which medical technology development can lead to solutions whereby the benefits are distributed inequitably across society, or can further exacerbate health inequalities (UK report reveals bias within medical tools and devices, 11 March). While the report is welcome, the challenge facing scientists and engineers is how to innovate medical devices differently to respond to longstanding societal biases and inequalities."

"Anyone who has driven a car through an unfamiliar place can attest to how easy it is to let GPS do all the work. That GPS can have a transformative effect on a society is undeniable. We have come to depend on a technology that, in theory, makes it impossible to get lost. But not only are we still getting lost, we may actually be losing a part of ourselves."

"Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients - including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits - once a single English database of medical data has been created."

""Not just here in this country, or in the United States, but virtually every adult human in the world has a cellphone, and they're all putting out data about where they are, what their preferences are, who they talk to and that data will run the world. That's why I call it the decade of data. "This is the beginning of it, not the end of it, we're just at the start," Pentland added. "

"David Davis MP, a former shadow home secretary, told the Guardian he has established that police will be able to access the health records of patients when investigating serious crimes even if they had opted out of the new database, which will hold the entire population's medical data in a single repository for the first time from May."

"Teenagers who engage with social media during the night could be damaging their sleep and increasing their risk of depression and anxiety, research shows."

"This challenge inspired the Royal London Society for Blind People to team up with design firm Ustwo and create Wayfindr, a Bluetooth enabled beacon system to guide people who are blind or visually impaired through the London Underground."

"Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?""

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"Big data and artificial intelligence are some of today's most popular buzzwords. Both are promised to help deliver insights that were previously too complex for computer systems to calculate. With examples ranging from personalised recommendation systems to automatic facial analyses, user-generated data is now analysed by algorithms to identify patterns and predict outcomes. And the common view is that these developments will have a positive impact on society."