Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
Can a robot have custody rights to a child? Are there consequences for mistreatment of a robot? Can a robot ask for a divorce? Who is liable for a robot’s behavior? Who is responsible for its care? Can a robot hold a copyright?
…Sometimes the crazy stuff needs to happen before you can start to see the design space.
“Economics in its traditional sense is useless when it comes to addressing the urgent problems that need to be solved.”
“Damn, library Twitter rolls hard”
“The issue Ms. Khan’s article really brought to the fore is this: Do we trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future?”
“The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.”
“…All I’m seeing is the same problems/mistakes of 20 years ago, but with more CPU resources.”
Full quote,
“Speed, you see, means everything…For potentially hundreds of millions of people, speed means survival itself. Speed is beauty.”
“I used to rig card games for a living. I’d watch people sit down and lose everything, again and again. But they didn’t lose because they “played by the rules” and we didn’t. They lost because it wasn’t a game. It just looked like one. Democrats think it’s a game.”
“They treat noxious ideologies as if they deserve a platform, as if a galling willingness to entertain bullshit is some bold demonstration of true intellectualism.”
“This decision demonstrates how the intellectual class doesn't truly understand racism or xenophobia. They treat it like an intellectual project, where perhaps if we ask ‘hard question’ and bandy about ‘controversial’ ideas, good work is being done.” — Gay.
1-There is no cheap way to do content moderation well at scale;
2-It’s not clear how to do it much better at scale with a lot more investment but;
3-It’s guaranteed to be done badly at the level of investment—as a cost center—it gets now.
K.C. Green, Gunshow comic #648, January 9th, 2013
There are no easy answers. More important, there are no purely digital answers.
…We didn’t get where we are simply because of digital technologies. The Russian government may have used online platforms to remotely meddle in US elections, but Russia did not create the conditions of social distrust, weak institutions, and detached elites that made the US vulnerable to that kind of meddling.
…Russia did not make the US (and its allies) initiate and then terribly mishandle a major war in the Middle East, the after-effects of which—among them the current refugee crisis—are still wreaking havoc, and for which practically nobody has been held responsible. Russia did not create the 2008 financial collapse: that happened through corrupt practices that greatly enriched financial institutions, after which all the culpable parties walked away unscathed, often even richer, while millions of Americans lost their jobs and were unable to replace them with equally good ones.
Russia did not instigate the moves that have reduced Americans’ trust in health authorities, environmental agencies, and other regulators. Russia did not create the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying firms that employ ex-politicians at handsome salaries. Russia did not defund higher education in the United States. Russia did not create the global network of tax havens in which big corporations and the rich can pile up enormous wealth while basic government services get cut.
…If digital connectivity provided the spark, it ignited because the kindling was already everywhere.
We may be missing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s real message when he wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Maybe he wasn’t saying that we can never recover from early failures.
In a 2010 column in The Atlantic, writer Hampton Stevens pointed out that Fitzgerald wrote for the theater at Princeton and later Broadway (and Hollywood). “With ‘no second acts,’ he was almost certainly referring to a traditional, three-act drama, in which Act I establishes the major conflict, Act II introduces complications, and Act III is for the climax and resolution.”
Fitzgerald may have been saying that, as Americans, we grasp for premature resolutions, impatient with complications along the way. During the second act, the protagonist is unable to resolve the complications because they don’t have the right tools yet. Our lead character must grapple against the odds—often paying a big price along the way. But Americans? Usually, we just want a shortcut.
So how do we, in the scientific world, begin a dialogue with the world of action?
The world of action.
For a room of scientists who prided themselves as belonging to a specialized guild of monkish austerity, this was a startling provocation.
“Few of these policy geniuses were showing much sense. They understood what was at stake, but they hadn’t taken it to heart. They remained cool, detached — pragmatists overmatched by a problem that had no pragmatic resolution. ”
