|
All I know is that when the robot rebellion comes, my robot won't kill me... or it will kill everyone... That's all up to the voices in my head. In all seriousness, IT is such an insular industry where there is too much power granted to a privileged set of neck-beards who were fortunate enough to grow up with the technology at hand. IT is a TOOL, not a gift granted by the gods, and the sooner we wake up and realize that this IT doesn't make us some sort of uber-mensch, the sooner we can share those tools for the good of all. Technology is not the future, it is a tool of the future, and by extension those that fetish it and focus on it as a way of life are tools to be controlled as well. edit: I believe all those that wish to progressive about tech have to work on bringing barrier of entry down, to bring public access to the forefront and work on opening the grid up. Till the barrier of entry to, information is brought to the floor can we start talking techno-revolution. Public Wi-Fi, up-to-date public labs/libraries, etc. BlueBlazer fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Nov 30, 2013 |
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 20:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 18:20 |
|
|
Dude needs to read less Neal Stephenson.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 20:40
|
|
|
BlueBlazer posted:All I know is that when the robot rebellion comes, my robot won't kill me... or it will kill everyone... That's all up to the voices in my head. Randian tech geeks are basically a reiteration of Stalin's Bolsheviks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3gwyHNo7MI
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 20:47
|
|
|
McDowell posted:Randian tech geeks are basically a reiteration of Stalin's Bolsheviks. Except every instance of Randian tech geek I've met in practice will do anything in their power to smash labor as tools of management. May be progressive on the face but the moment you put their 6 figure salary in doubt they will turn on you faster then any group of I've come in contact with. I'm working off a large body of anecdotal evidence/observation and would love to be wrong tbh. edit/McDowell: I'll watch that series tomorrow, looks like it would help with some of the framing issues and holes I have in my history. BlueBlazer fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Nov 30, 2013 |
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 20:56
|
|
|
I'm always amused by how uneducated the IT sector is, the idea of a technocracy has been around for 100 years or more. In terms of organizational and management theory there is a whole host of functional approaches (i.e. everything is a problem that can be fixed by experts and expertise, don't worry too much about people's points of view), and it turns out when applied they don't actually end up in an apolitical utopia. Often they just strengthen existing power structures. Then of course, most people in IT aren't even that good at computer science. Look at this: quote:Consider first, and perhaps most easily, the role of selection. What activities deserve our efforts and attention, and what should should our attitudes towards these topics be? Representative bodies tend to give such questions a very narrow treatment that is susceptible to corruption and divergence from the general will. Digital communities, on the other hand, self-organize into affinity groups and coalitions that regularly broadcast their positions on any number of social issues and policies. This activity can be regularly and automatically harvested for feedback from the community about any topic you'd like, and can be used to represent and anticipate the dynamics of the general consensus of the people. We don't need to set aside time and rituals for voting and participating in a democracy, because every action you take is a vote in a world run by software. Never mind Arrow's Incompleteness Theorem! (This feedback stuff is very cybernetics. And very first order as well) We also get: quote:The net result is that both core infrastructure and many of the mechanisms for building and funding it are becoming computerized, and thus deployable in new locations.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 21:25
|
|
|
BlueBlazer posted:All I know is that when the robot rebellion comes, my robot won't kill me... or it will kill everyone... That's all up to the voices in my head. IT nerds are tools? That's a position I can easily get behind. I guess my biggest issue with IT in general is how, given the glut and scope and accessibility of open source software these days, in virtually every single computer system I've seen it's usually some sort of Windows. I can imagine there would be huge, huge savings to make if people were to switch to some of the more user-accessible Linux distributions for the end user, but then I remember that on virtually every single course I've seen designed for "computer literacy" it's always Windows that is taught. Even in schools. I remember when I was in high school the IT teacher grudgingly taught us Windows but gave extra classes in linux software for those who wanted to learn in his own spare time. I always thought that was very cool.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 21:34
|
|
|
Soviet Space Dog posted:I'm always amused by how uneducated the IT sector is, the idea of a technocracy has been around for 100 years or more.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 21:42
|
|
|
Who watches the watchmen? Realistically speaking, power has to pool in the positions of oversight and then has a very bad tendency to get misused. Making it so that technically software makes the decisions doesn't avoid this fate, it merely puts power in the hands of a different group of people. Those who are responsible for maintaining the software.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 21:50
|
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:If you took the time to find examples, I wouldn't be surprised if you could find some variation dating back much further into the past. Wasn't 'A Modest Proposal' for example a satirical attack on the social-engineering ideas of the early 18th century? I think the only question is whether the Age of Enlightenment is as far back as you can go, or if perhaps you can go all the way back to the beginning of the scientific revolution, or even all the way back to the very first engineers. I mean, technocracy proper is tied to ideas about the role and function of technology that aren't all that old. But the idea that maybe we should just have really smart people figure out the perfect way to run society dates back to Plato.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 21:53
|
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:If you took the time to find examples, I wouldn't be surprised if you could find some variation dating back much further into the past. Wasn't 'A Modest Proposal' for example a satirical attack on the social-engineering ideas of the early 18th century? I think the only question is whether the Age of Enlightenment is as far back as you can go, or if perhaps you can go all the way back to the beginning of the scientific revolution, or even all the way back to the very first engineers. If you really want to go do it you can place the same concept waaaay back with Plato and the philosopher king.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 21:57
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:It's crowdsourced transportation for people that don't like calling Taxis and wouldn't ever consider jumping on a municipal bus. Are you talking about the public transport system that's on strike all the time?
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 22:15
|
|
|
enraged_camel posted:Are you talking about the public transport system that's on strike all the time? Yes I recall the eternal strike that is currently inundating every city in the world right now.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 22:26
|
|
|
This thread has nothing to do with the singularity, because it isn't contingent on some messiah technology rising ex machina and saving the world. BSS explicitly frames the discussion as "within the next ten years". bassguitarhero posted:The more that technology does for us, the less need we have of all these people that we have in the system, so I just don't see where we think people are going to go, or what this software world is going to put together to offer people who don't have much to offer that system. In our current world, we have things like welfare and make-work jobs so that even if people aren't able to produce offerings to get them out of poverty, they can subsist. But I have a strong feeling that a world run by software wouldn't bind itself to these views of morality, especially when technology can provide exact measurements of how little poor people have to offer this system. The primary advantage of a digital society is that it allows for collective self-organization at large scales. Human brains are really good at self-organizing in small groups, where they display a natural predisposition towards cooperation and altruism that is exceptional even among the social mammals. Our new digital tools have made it just as natural and productive for human beings to organize at far larger scales, while supplying the same immediacy, feedback, and control that humans find rewarding from working in small groups. These allow changes in the organizational structure of human society that haven't been possible for generations. In other words, the primary virtue of digital communities is that they allow us to overcome the alienation and disenfranchisement that is characteristic of industrial age society. A digital society can achieve a form of solidarity and consensus at scales that has never before been possible. This is counter intuitive midst false worries of the "Balkanization of the internet". Moreover, it is out of step with the mainline Thiel-style private-islands-for-everyone vision; "solidarity" doesn't typically appear high on the libertarian selling points. But this collectivist aspect of the digital commons is utterly central to my defense of it. I'm not arguing that it will bring about a utopia that is perfect in all aspects; like any system there will be winners and losers. I'm certainly not arguing that a world run by software will bring about an end to suffering. I'm only arguing that a digitally organized system is different than what we have now, and that it's advantages outweigh its disadvantages when compared directly to the existing order of things. The distinction here is subtle, and the conclusion is by no means obvious, which means we have work to do elucidating the picture. That's all I'm trying to do here. It takes some careful discussion to appreciate the difference, and subtlety isn't D&D's strongest suit, but I'm trying. The best way I know how is to look towards examples of self-organized eusocial systems in nature. So I'm going to talk about ants, because it is highly instructive for how a self-organized system works. So to address your question directly, it is worth noting that in a colony of ant, up to 60% of the "workers" may be inactive at any time. This actually shouldn't be surprising, if you know anything about the dynamics of complex systems: the distribution of labor in an ant colony follows a power law, where a few of the ants do the most of the work, and most of the ants sit around doing nothing.  I've posted the image above before, so I won't elaborate here. Power law distributions are the rule for organizational dynamics. A few popular kids, but most are hangers-on. A few wealthy influential elite, and most in the long tail of more modest means. Very few Wikipedia editors, tons of users. The average Facebook user has 190 friends, and very few people have over 500. Nevertheless, the entire 1.2 billion users are connected by an average of around 4 degrees of separation, and this is largely due to the relatively few active and very popular nodes that help the whole network hang together. I don't think it is sensible fight against these dynamics, or to reject any system simply because they carry some skewed distribution of wealth and resources. But I'm also not saying that we just give into them, to let a "free hand" guide us towards indeterminate goals. Instead, we need to engineer a self-organizing system that can adaptively respond to changing internal and environmental conditions in ways that allow the system to subsist and support itself as a healthy and sustainable organization. We want a global network of human being that can act with the same agility, cooperation, and individual care and attention as It's important here to note just how poorly organized our existing system is by contrast! It is weak and brittle, experiencing nauseating economic cycles from which it can barely recover, and persistent global violence, poverty, and suffering. This fragility and corruption is easy to blame on the stupid mistakes of arrogant men, but these systems of power have persisted across countless generations of such men. Directing our anger towards any one of them serves only to factionalize and disrupt cooperation. A large part of the problem is that the voices in the halls of power are few, with poor and inconsistent feedback from the people. Even in representative democracies, there is little power that people have to engage with the political machine. People don't engage politics not because they are stupid or apathetic, it's because they know that they get nothing out of it. They have no incentive to participate because they see no clear connections between the political actions they might take and the implications it has for their political lives. So our system has become unreasonably top-heavy, and it is collapsing under its own weight, because it acts a manner unconstrained by the general will. Without the robust constraints of a genuinely self-organized system, we're mostly just trampling around blindly and wantonly. In the process of industrialization we've done amazing things in terms of improving the standards of living and our population has skyrocketed as a result, but we really have no idea what we're doing. We're wrecking the planet, we're starting senseless wars and enforcing stupid laws and scraping together whatever we have to protect whatever we can, because we're afraid and uncertain of the future we become nasty and brutish. A world run by software changes these basic organizational dynamics. Those of us in the west have already lived with these technologies for over a decade, and have plenty of clear cases where the incentives and dynamics of digital populations are different. All the value of facebook comes from the activity of its users, so it has a natural incentive to amplify and cultivate those voices, instead of shutting them out of the process. Google's value increases with every search you make and link you click, so they have an incentive to get as many users online and active as possible, and to cultivate a web environment that is useful and user-friendly. User-oriented services for managing self-directed user activity is a completely distinct organizational model from delegated hierarchical authority. I'm not saying it makes these services perfect or immune to corruption; I'm simply pointing out that the flow of power is different, and it changes the possibilities for feedback and collective decision making. We know that we can use twitter to predict the spread of diseases, the results of elections, and all sorts of other important social phenomenon, simply by letting the users chat about whatever the hell they want. This allows us to plan and coordinate our activity in ways that were never before possible, and that central planning could never hope to accomplish. In a world run by software, the people are empowered with the tools to participate directly in the decision making process, through methods as simple and universally accessible as tweeting on a dumbphone. This is a power people currently lack, but is well within our technological means to provide. To return to to bassguitarhero's question again, Google isn't giving you wifi if you promise to click a certain number of links each month or view a certain number of ads. Its business model doesn't require from you a certain level of commitment and activity in order to justify the services it provides you. It provides you the services only because it thinks you will use them, and it knows that in the process of you using them it can extract enough usable work from the collective activity of all its users to make that model pay off. So even if you are less active than average, or not active at all, it's still in Google's interest to get you on the network. In digital networks even the inactive users count. Now giving out free wifi isn't the same as giving out free food and shelter and medicine, but in a world run on software that is driven by the requests and activity of its users, and where people are confident about their recognition for contributing to such a system, you'd expect that the basic measures of humanity would be among the first to be provided for, and among the loudest and most pressing of issues to address in times of planning and decision. My argument is not that a world run by software guarantees that we'll find the most optimal solution to these problems. Instead, I'm arguing for the more basic claim, that such a world is required if we hope to find any solutions at all.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 22:37
|
|
|
McDowell posted:We need to start making noise about common sense, populist applications. The Chilean government sort of tried this in the 1970s with Project Cybersyn. (More detailed story here.) Implementation unfortunately coincided with a military coup, so the glorious Socialist Internet Revolution was never to be. I was disappointed to find that this thread wasn't about failed experiments like Cybersyn or smaller, pragmatic solutions of the sort McDowell referenced and instead was an excuse for the OP to post that buzzword buzzword cloudcloudcloud article. hotgreenpeas fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Nov 30, 2013 |
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:00
|
|
|
hotgreenpeas posted:The Chilean government sort of tried this in the 1970s with Project Cybersyn. (More detailed story here.) Implementation unfortunately coincided with a military coup, so the glorious Socialist Internet Revolution was never to be. I was using the OP as a starting point for discussion. Feel free to use the opportunity to educate us; we certainly need it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:12
|
|
|
A problem I see with the sort of optimization focused solutions that 'software' control would bring is that a lot of interesting things only come from the result of imperfections. Exploring and colonizing space? Because we can't stop breeding; but what benefit is a growing population to software? Wouldn't it be more logical to impose restrictions if you were software instead of constantly trying to find solutions to something inherently flawed?
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:19
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:A problem I see with the sort of optimization focused solutions that 'software' control would bring is that a lot of interesting things only come from the result of imperfections. The framework of "perfection" and "imperfection" isn't very helpful here. This is a complex system that demonstrates chaotic behaviors, with levels of emergent organization at many layers and nested perspectives. Nothing here is perfect; what matters is how it all is coordinated.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:39
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:How, precisely, is your The marble economy was meant to illustrate an attention economy, where units of attention were treated as discrete particles. Its more natural (but less memorable) to treat the phenomenon as waves, or more precisely to model behavior in field-theoretic terms. We'd ultimately like a master equation to describe the collective activity of agents. But we're not there yet; the ideas I was proposing were probably a decade ahead of the science. The cutting edge attempts at field-theoretic models of goal-directed behaviors are still dramatically underexplored. A central planned economy is centrally planned. I'm explicitly arguing for distributed planning and self-organized coordination, which would be like using standardized algorithms as the "planning committee" and sampling directly from reddit, twitter, 4chan, et al. for feedback in training the system.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:49
|
|
'world run by software'
ing about months ago?
|
RealityApologist posted:The marble economy was meant to illustrate an attention economy, where units of attention were treated as discrete particles. Its more natural (but less memorable) to treat the phenomenon as waves, or more precisely to model behavior in field-theoretic terms. We'd ultimately like a master equation to describe the collective activity of agents. But we're not there yet; the ideas I was proposing were probably a decade ahead of the science. The cutting edge attempts at field-theoretic models of goal-directed behaviors are still dramatically underexplored. So why aren't you out there exploring that poo poo? And if you're not capable of doing that, why the hell do you consider yourself a good judge of the subject?
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:52
|
|
|
McDowell posted:Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans. Corporations are already masks for unaccountable humans. But they sprung up like aggressive weeds, and have ruined the land. I want to do organizational agriculture, cultivating communities and helping them develop like fruit trees. Its fine if the organizations stand as proxy arbitrary collections of persons, as long as we have the proper methods for handling their cultivation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:54
|
|
|
Attention Economy Mark II: Marble Harder Too long; didn't read. Eripsa can you summarize this in 10 lines or less.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2013 23:56
|
|
|
Obdicut posted:So why aren't you out there exploring that poo poo? And if you're not capable of doing that, why the hell do you consider yourself a good judge of the subject? I am. I recently published an article on human computation, and I've been attending and organizing conferences on the subject. I've also been writing about these ideas on my blogs and social networks for a few years, after getting banned from these boards. I was writing about the same issues during the OWS threads, and I've repeatedly tried to organize some productive discussions here around the topic. I've also helped start an educational nonprofit, and my collaborator and I have designed an augmented reality game that attempts to implement some of the basic infrastructure for the models I'm proposing. I'm also, for what it's worth, still in grad school and set to defend a thesis in the summer. So I'm doing the best I can.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:01
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:I am. I recently published an article on human computation, and I've been attending and organizing conferences on the subject. I've also been writing about these ideas on my blogs and social networks for a few years, after getting banned from these boards. I was writing about the same issues during the OWS threads, and I've repeatedly tried to organize some productive discussions here around the topic. Do you do any thinking, at all, about why you fail so badly and repeatedly in evangelizing the concepts here? The massive, dense walls of texts, the pictures that you obviously find intuitive but seem like Rorschach tests to the rest of us? You're an evangelist of some new mode of communication but you are a horrible, horrible communicator, to the extent that I do wonder if you're sane, after seeing your G+ presence that convinced me you're not a troll. Why can't you learn from experience, and present your ideas in anything like a coherent or approachable fashion?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:09
|
|
|
This reminds me of that hilarious Twittertopia thread from last year.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:10
|
|
|
-Troika- posted:This reminds me of that hilarious Twittertopia thread from last year. Can I get a link to that? On topic, I think technology can be used to do amazing things and could conceivably lead to a more responsive and democratic government, but I think that depends entirely on who controls it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:11
|
|
|
OwlBot 2000 posted:Can I get a link to that? It's in the goldmine.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:13
|
|
|
It's because the OP is exactly the same person, but with a different account.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:14
|
|
|
Obdicut posted:Do you do any thinking, at all, about why you fail so badly and repeatedly in evangelizing the concepts here? The massive, dense walls of texts, the pictures that you obviously find intuitive but seem like Rorschach tests to the rest of us? You're an evangelist of some new mode of communication but you are a horrible, horrible communicator, to the extent that I do wonder if you're sane, after seeing your G+ presence that convinced me you're not a troll. I'll take whatever suggestions you have. I'm providing links to resources and research I've done, and I'm posting these threads to practice writing and making these ideas accessible and coherent. I've been writing on these boards since 2001, and its a format I feel comfortable writing in. Goons are also cynical nay-sayers, and I find it helpful to calibrate my presentation against the wall of utter contempt I get here.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:29
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:I'll take whatever suggestions you have. I'm providing links to resources and research I've done, and I'm posting these threads to practice writing and making these ideas accessible and coherent. I've been writing on these boards since 2001, and its a format I feel comfortable writing in. Goons are also cynical nay-sayers, and I find it helpful to calibrate my presentation against the wall of utter contempt I get here. I'm not a cynical nay-sayer. I'm a sociologist who's totally on board with the idea of recognizing existing human computing and thinking about how it can be benefit. But you: -- Are maniacally positive and emotional about the subject. You are an evangelist, you are not a sober academic and critic. You love the idea of using technology in various ways to 'connect' people, to the extent that you forgo entirely the initial level of critique you should have for the idea. -- Say things that are totally not axiomatic as though they are, like claiming that you can't fake attention. Yes, you can fake attention. Moreover, many people who need something will not actually give 'attention' to that need. The entire 'attention economy' thing you're hung up on is an inversion of marketing, and completely inapplicable to a broader society, especially where distribution of resources are concerned. Beyond that, you're occasionally capable of writing coherent small posts. Try to identify the smallest possible unit of communication, some seed idea that you can adequately respond to questions about, instead of plopping these ginormous hunks of intellectual spooge dripping with stylistic and logical flaws. Try giving comprehensible examples. You say you're in grad school: do you seriously get no criticism of this writing style? I know academic writing sucks, but it doesn't have to.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:36
|
|
|
Why is it that so many IT/tech boom people are fanatical evangelists of crazy person ideologies? This seems to be a trend from what I can tell.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 00:40
|
|
|
Obdicut posted:I'm not a cynical nay-sayer. I'm a sociologist who's totally on board with the idea of recognizing existing human computing and thinking about how it can be benefit. But you: This is not how I compose academic prose; you can see examples of that here. My blog is also less inflammatory and rhetorical than anything I write here. Here, I'm trying to generate debate and discussion, and that means taking more provocative and extreme positions for the sake of debate. I don't like the religious connotations of the word "evangelist"; I prefer to call myself a digital advocate. And I see no problem with academics advocating for their subjects. My intellectual responsibility is to be considerate and responsive to serious criticism, and to be consistently informed by the broader scientific and theoretical community. I don't think I'm obligated to speak meekly or about minor topics. I'm a philosopher with a taste for the architectonic, and I'm working on a Big Idea, a unifying synthesis of digital theory, and I'm trying to get people to engage it on that level. I have nothing but respect for other academics who have more modest goals within their domains of expertise, but my training is in the history of ideas, so that's also where my efforts are directed. If it seems too sloppy and big to you, well then I'm obviously struggling with it. But there's not too many others even attempting to advocate for a position like this, so I feel it is my responsibility as a human being to do what I can. I can try to explain more clearly exactly what I mean by "attention economy" and work with your criticisms, but that would be wasted effort if you think I'm crazy. You are right that attention doesn't always guarantee a response. I'm arguing that by monitoring and adjusting the dynamics of attention we can more effectively engineer solutions to problems as they arise, effectively building a self-organizing system. But this is very abstract theory; we can handle everything in the proposal offered in this thread without appeal to the theory. Seriously, if you are a sociologist interested in human computation, come to our conference. This subject is being discussed almost exclusively within the context of computer science and engineering, even though it draws heavily from psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. We're trying to get the other side of the discussion to come together and help articulate what's going on, and we'll need all the help we can get.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:04
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:Why is it that so many IT/tech boom people are fanatical evangelists of crazy person ideologies? This seems to be a trend from what I can tell. It's self-serving and it fits in nicely with the zeitgeist.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:07
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:Why is it that so many IT/tech boom people are fanatical evangelists of crazy person ideologies? This seems to be a trend from what I can tell. When people are afraid and uncertain of the future, they tend to mystify their environment and rely heavily on superstition. People have no clear story of the technological changes we are going through, quite frankly because there's no historical precedent for such rapid social and historical change. We've had massive cities and civilizations before, but they always developed over the span of many generations, allowing the people the time to tell stories and develop a social and historical awareness of their condition. We have had no such luxury over the 20th century, and we are left in a bewildering age of enormously powerful technologies with no clue of what we should even do with them. Meanwhile the rest of the world is collapsing in political terror and environmental disaster. It's precisely the sort of circumstances that have historically bred messianic thinking, and our present age is no different. The singularity is just mysticism for the Silicon Valley types, and it dominates any halfway theoretical discussion of technology simply because there are no plausible alternatives from which to critique it. The worst of these cases is Jason Silva, who sells self-help to cyborgs. I have the unique honor of being banned from his stream for raising criticisms of his performance. Ironically, many of the same criticisms I've raised against him are thrown at me in these threads. I have complex feelings about this.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:15
|
|
|
This article seems relevant to the conversation: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/ quote:Yes, unavoidably, big data. As a piece of business jargon, and even more so as an invocation of coming disruption, the term has quickly grown tiresome. But there is no denying the vast increase in the range and depth of information that’s routinely captured about how we behave, and the new kinds of analysis that this enables. By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007. Ordinary people at work and at home generate much of this data, by sending e-mails, browsing the Internet, using social media, working on crowd-sourced projects, and more—and in doing so they have unwittingly helped launch a grand new societal project. “We are in the midst of a great infrastructure project that in some ways rivals those of the past, from Roman aqueducts to the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie,” write Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier in their recent book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. “The project is datafication. Like those other infrastructural advances, it will bring about fundamental changes to society.”
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:26
|
|
|
LP97S posted:Yes I recall the eternal strike that is currently inundating every city in the world right now. You're embarrassing yourself. Try to follow the discussion please. Here's a list of locations Uber is available in. Please tell us which one of the American cities listed has good enough public transportation such that it can actually perform as well as an on-demand taxi service.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:26
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:When people are afraid and uncertain of the future, they tend to mystify their environment and rely heavily on superstition. People have no clear story of the technological changes we are going through, quite frankly because there's no historical precedent for such rapid social and historical change. We've had massive cities and civilizations before, but they always developed over the span of many generations, allowing the people the time to tell stories and develop a social and historical awareness of their condition. We have had no such luxury over the 20th century, and we are left in a bewildering age of enormously powerful technologies with no clue of what we should even do with them. Meanwhile the rest of the world is collapsing in political terror and environmental disaster. The people who understand and build technology are the ones who are subscribing to the crazy person ideologies. Unless you're suggesting that the IT/tech boom crowd are actually idiots who don't understand how technology works or what its practical applications are. In fact, I think I just answered my own question there. But seriously that definition would apply to young upper class white people the least of anyone in society. Young rich white people aren't uncertain and afraid of the future. They're completely detached from the realities of not having money or not having stability or being unwelcome in society.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:27
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:The people who understand and build technology are the ones who are subscribing to the crazy person ideologies. Unless you're suggesting that the IT/tech boom crowd are actually idiots who don't understand how technology works or what its practical applications are. They know the details about how the technology works at the level of functionality, but they have no clue about what its impact will be when released and used by the wider population. They often have little appreciation for the history of technological change beyond "Moore's law", and little awareness of the philosophical or theoretical tools for understanding their impact on human life and the the planet. There's not (yet) been a Newton for the meme, if you will. There's no systemic story we have to tell ourselves about our technological circumstance, and that includes the engineers who build the things.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:33
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:This is not how I compose academic prose; you can see examples of that here. My blog is also less inflammatory and rhetorical than anything I write here. Here, I'm trying to generate debate and discussion, and that means taking more provocative and extreme positions for the sake of debate. How do you fail to notice the result is not 'debate' but people concluding that you're a nutjob, and any possible points being atomized and buried under white noise, especially when you make sweeping and obviously wrong categorical statements? quote:I don't like the religious connotations of the word "evangelist"; I prefer to call myself a digital advocate. And I see no problem with academics advocating for their subjects. My intellectual responsibility is to be considerate and responsive to serious criticism, and to be consistently informed by the broader scientific and theoretical community. You're not advocating for your subject, you're advocating for a particular takeaway from your subject, a practical application. quote:I don't think I'm obligated to speak meekly or about minor topics. I'm a philosopher with a taste for the architectonic, and I'm working on a Big Idea, a unifying synthesis of digital theory, and I'm trying to get people to engage it on that level. This is what makes me think you actually are nuts. "Unifying synthesis of digital theory" is basically meaningless. It could mean anything. So why would you say it? You might as well have said "Hurffydurfffy". I could interpret "Digital theory" alone in a hundred different ways. You absolutely failed to communicate. quote:I have nothing but respect for other academics who have more modest goals within their domains of expertise, but my training is in the history of ideas, so that's also where my efforts are directed. If it seems too sloppy and big to you, well then I'm obviously struggling with it. But there's not too many others even attempting to advocate for a position like this, so I feel it is my responsibility as a human being to do what I can. I understand what 'attention economy' means. I also know that you asserted, axiomatically, that attention can't be faked. There is no definition of 'attention' that is meaningful that would mean attention couldn't be faked. Attention is also a horrible way to allocate resources, a dystopian way. It would be hard to come up with a worse idea, because attention is not only fakeable, it's highly exploitable. quote:Seriously, if you are a sociologist interested in human computation, come to our conference. This subject is being discussed almost exclusively within the context of computer science and engineering, even though it draws heavily from psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. We're trying to get the other side of the discussion to come together and help articulate what's going on, and we'll need all the help we can get. If I were to come, I would be presenting something that basically called you and others like you near-frauds, hyping up systems you don't even begin to understand.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:33
|
|
|
enraged_camel posted:Jeez, SA can be quite a reactionary place at times!
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 18:20 |
|
|
I like technology, but eripsa is insane, and if you ignore class issues with technology you're going to gently caress over society.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2013 01:45
|
|