Group items tagged

"Tristan Harris presents on 1) why humans as a species are vulnerable to technology, 2) why it's so hard to solve the issues of social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and exponential tech, and 3) what it will take to come together to avoid these existential threats."

"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."

""With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable," says Finlay Shakespeare. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. With streaming, he says: "If I didn't gel with an album or an artist's work at first, I tended not to go back to it." But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. "Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music." Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention."

"When Fry returned to London, she realised how mathematicians, computer engineers and physicists are so used to working on abstract problems that they rarely stop to consider the ethics of how their work might be used"

"In Mexico, government-exclusive spyware technology is being used to target journalists, human rights defenders, anti-corruption advocates, and international investigators. Luis Fernando Garcia, Director of R3D, explains how technology meant to track terrorists is being turned against activists"

"Just ahead of the first anniversary of its release, Indian law enforcers are accusing the popular game of inciting violence and distracting kids from their studies, even pushing for a large-scale prohibition of the "battle-royal" style shooter. Following numerous complaints by parents, a temporary ban on the mobile app was first announced by police in metropolitan Rajkot, with some other cities multiplayer-game soon following suit. While the current ban only extends until March 30, the police and children's rights watchdog are petitioning New Delhi to ban the game altogether"

"They've moved "authoritative sources" to the top search results. The question we need to ask is: "How does this play out in the Real World?" In the real world it means that the worldview, the political bias, the social preferences, the positions taken in various ideological and scientific controversies - as decided by top Google Executives - have been virtually hard-coded into Google's search algorithms. No longer is Google returning "unbiased and objective results"."

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