It can be nearly impossible to credibly predict all the positive possibilities and negative implications for how we live, work, govern, and organize arising from the deployment of AI.
The fact that we are deeply uncertain about how technologies will evolve in the years and decades ahead makes human rights due diligence of AI very challenging.
The fact that the rapid development of AI raises challenges for securing access to remedy, which can be especially challenging when humans often can’t cognitively understand how a decision is made by AI systems:
The fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly being used by businesses, governments, and other institutions to augment many fields of human endeavor.
The fact that Methodologies for implementing respect for human rights may need to integrate strategic tools such as strategic foresight, futures thinking, and scenario planning.
The fact that the global “platformization” of content (i.e., the rise of Video on Demand and online streaming platforms) shows us that guarantees of people’s access to the culture of their selection may now become beholden to digital intermediaries.
Proponents believe that the further development of AI creates new opportunities in health, education, and transportation, will generate wealth and strengthen economies and can be used to solve pressing social issues. However, the rapid growth of AI raises important questions about whether our current policies, legal systems, business due diligence practices, and methods to protect rights are fit for purpose.
The significant expansion of data collected and analyzed may also result in increasing the power of companies with ownership over this data and threaten our right to privacy.
HERE ARE A FEW OF PROBLEMS THAT ARE NOT DISCUSSED.
As the digital paradigm evolves, the pathway for human rights is likely to become more complicated, making appropriate regulation more important than ever. The realization of ESCR and the right to development centers on data democracies that are accountable.
Global policy discourses and frameworks around data have skewed the digital innovation tide in favor of developed countries… the global “platformization” of content… shows us that guarantees of people’s access to the culture of their selection may now become beholden to digital intermediaries.
Data and technological arrangements in the global South and North worryingly point to a wholesale private capture and consolidation of critical data regimes in the developing world: trade, agriculture, health, and education.
Not only does this leave citizens in developing countries vulnerable to acute privacy violations, but it also bears decisively on their economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs). For example, in India, the acquisition of homegrown successes, such as Wal-Mart’s purchase of the domestic e-commerce unicorn, Flipkart, poses very serious outcomes for the livelihoods of small producers and traders.
Algorithm-based decision-making by companies could also perpetuate human bias and result in discriminatory outcomes, as they already have in some cases.
An algorithm is meant to complement and not necessarily displace human discernment, it is not hard to imagine a future where humanitarian assistance to refugees becomes predicated on their (technology proven) ability to viably assimilate and contribute to their host economies.
Could the trade-off for a smoother resettlement process be the exclusion of those that the algorithm will one day write off as “inadmissible” and “unsolvable”?
Technology-based decision-making also raises important questions on how the right to development will be realized.
Artificial intelligence is undermining society by promising unimaginable benefits without any intervention from governments or other world organizations.
As always we humans react to crises when it’s too late.
Governments must create policies for effective data sharing between governments and the private sector for sectors that are of critical social importance.
More importantly, governments must create a data commons with independent oversight.
For example:
The municipality of Curitiba in Brazil, for instance, has taken the lead in passing local legislation that mandates anonymized data sharing between the local government and the ride aggregator Uber. The intention is to tap into Uber’s large and rich data sets towards better city planning and traffic management outcomes.
Governments must invest in the idea of “data as a public good” so it can work to enhance human rights.
Although nascent, experiments with models for managing big data repositories are increasing. Such repositories can encourage domestically led innovation, with local start-ups and public agencies taking the lead in developing appropriate AI-based solutions for social problems.
These are pressing policy challenges, and such prediction models need to be closely and continuously tracked for possible social distortions and subject to institutional audit. The biases in AI is often the bias of humans. People will not rely on technology they do not trust.
Society needs to come together to consider these questions, explore solutions, and deploy AI that puts people first, protects human rights, and deserves the public’s trust.
Breakthroughs in technology—including artificial intelligence—can help fulfill the right to development, but digital technologies are not magic bullets; there is a strong role for governance.
The security of digital bits cannot be left to the cloud nor the internet of things, promoted by Amazon, Facebook, and Google with home hubs that can be hacked.
Civil society groups, governments, and others are rightly asking questions regarding the risks to human rights. In this age of global corporate presence and influence, we need to ensure that ordinary people and communities are able to stand up for their rights.
But the danger with artificial intelligence is greater than just our rights.
Everything that makes who we are comes from our brains. Without brain power, we would not have gone from flint arrowheads to the space station.
DESTROY THE BRAIN WITH AI AND WE DESTROY CREATIVITY.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
I AM NOT TALKING HERE ABOUT DEMOCRACY THAT IS FOUND AT THE
BOTTOM OF A BOTTLE OF WHISKY BUT REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY THAT
MAY HAVE RUN ITS COURSE.
Technology is fundamentally shifting how government works and how it relates to the citizens it ostensibly represents. In the wake of fake news, algorithms operated by business are shaping a world in which earthly government is becoming less and less functional.
Smartphones with their ease of use and constant accessibility are changing our social networks and reshaping our political world.
Because Social Media companies, not Governments are launching new policies. We need to take a more critical look at the role of social media in society.
The biggest challenge is technology that could potentially help end corruption and lobbying, allow people to delegate votes to trusted friends rather than politicians, and empower experts in a field to meaningfully impact policy cannot be achieved while the content of social media has no legal means of ensuring transparency or verification of authenticity prior to any posting.
WHILE THIS STATE REMAINS Representative democracy may have run its course.
Social Media companies like Facebook, Twitter, U Tube and their like are now shaping a world in which earthly government is becoming inoperative.
SO HOW MIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA – ALGORITHMS – AI – MACHINE LEARNING – ALTER THE CAPACITY OF CITIZENS TO GOVERN THEMSELVES?
As unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s now being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated.
We should all be very wary news feeds which are being personalized.
ONE OF THE GREATEST PROBLEMS for the future is the worldwide existing inequality in access to new communication technologies. It threatens to aggravate existing social inequalities.
How does social media influence a democratic society?
By allowing us to create our very own feeds and essentially live in them.
By allowing algorithms to design communication packages just for individuals with each component full chosen in advance.
By allowing advertising without checking their source of purchase.
By allowing petitions to be voted on.
By allowing algorithms to create what’s called polarization, or an information cocoon.
By allowing another communication channel between voters and politicians.
If there’s one fundamental truth about social media’s impact on democracy it’s that it amplifies human intent — both good and bad. At its best, it allows us to express ourselves and take action. At its worst, it allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy.
One way or the other we are arriving rapidly to a crossroads whether we want true freedom of choice or short-term data-driven decisions to rule the roost.
If we can bank online, we can vote online.
We can now publish online, shout online, share music and ideas online, expose new knowledge online, regroup and connect online, bank online. The only thing we still can’t do online is voting on our own laws. No, instead we’re still living under a bizarre psycho-political industrial-era system that wants us to believe we’re represented by elected officials.
The structure of a direct democracy government is simple, and yet profound, giving rise to several questions that need a wide-reaching topic for debate.
SUCH AS.
The people have the final say in every decision that the government makes. That is because, in this government structure, the people are the government.
This can only work if everyone is involved in the voting process in some way. WHICH IS TOTALLY UNWORKABLE.
WHO WANTS MOB RULE.
Voters cannot authentically decide a course of action to take if they are not presented with complete and accurate information. This structure of government requires that all citizens be given the same information and shared within an equal time frame.
It could also allow a majority of people to oppress certain groups in a harmful manner.
IT CAN ONLY WORK IN THE VILLAGE HALL.
Once we count on AI to decide what we do our concept of life will have to change.
Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make any sense, as with most art and religions.
Can parliaments and political parties overcome the challenges?
At the moment it does not seem so. Technological disruption is not even a leading item on the political agenda.
Google and Twitter are attention merchants. They capture our attention and resell it to advertisers. We are becoming their product.
Governments need to nationalize our data.
It is now or never that regulate the ownership of data if we don’t want to end up living in a digital dictatorship.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Online privacy and surveillance are one of the defining issues of our age.
Or is it?
When one looks at deforestation, glacier recession, ocean acidification, plastic suffocation, climate change, Putin, Trump, not to mention the current wars, Brexit, and whether China will rule the world perhaps it is only a drop in the ocean of problems we have.
In the proverbial fog of technology, most of us it seems could not care less.
Who cares if some agency is reading our emails, on the other hand, we would be pretty naive to think that intelligence agencies would not jump at the chance to read the world’s emails.
Countries have and will always spy on each other.
You would also be blinkered to think those big multinationals don’t do the same thing.
Given the choice of making money and doing the right thing, listed companies are bound to make money.
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO PROJECT OUR LIBERAL WISH LIST ON ANY OF THESE TITANS OF CAPITALISM.
WE ARE THE PRODUCT BEING SOLD.
The fact is that we can do virtually nothing about any of this, except live off -grid which will probably make your data more valuable.
WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE EU GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATIONS?
IF YOU ASK ME THEY WILL NOT MADE A FIDDLERS DIFFERENCE TO ANY OF US.
DATA IS BEING COLLECTED WILLY NILLY INSIDE THE EU AND OUTSIDE.
How can anyone complain or sue about violations of the new rules when they are totally incomprehensible to the ordinary punter.
SINCE THEIR ARRIVAL WE NOW HAVE CORPORATIONS ON THE WEB ASKING US TO READ VOLUMES OF AMENDED PRIVACY POLICY.
BUT HAS IT CHANGED ANYTHING.
NO. OUR BASIC DATA IS MORE VALUABLE THAN OUR PRIVATE LIVES.
Maybe we should stop blindly trusting algorithms that are exploiting us.
The conversations we’re now having will form the foundations of the future and the owners of this data will have the knowledge makes us all short on knowledge, and rest assured that knowledge is not the same as information.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
While we are all preoccupied with artificial intelligence the development of quantum chips is progressing in relevant silence.
IF SUCH A CHIP ARRIVES COMPUTER WILL BE ABLE TO PERFORM MORE CALCULATIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY THAN THERE ARE ATOMS IN THE KNOW UNIVERSE.
Get your head around that if you can.
CHEMICAL REACTIONS AND THE PROPERTIES OF MATERIALS ARE DETERMINED BY THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN ATOMS AND MOLECULES. THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE UNIVERSE AND ALL THAT IS IN IT – GOVERNED BY QUANTUM PHENOMENA.
So a quantum computer will require a fundamentally different way of thinking what programming is and you can rest assured that present-day machine learning will crack the coding required for such a computer sooner than later.
The first useful quantum machine might be years away but the quantum qubits are on the way to replace the microchip.
Already buried in all the Artificial Intelligence hip Google recently announced Bristlecone a new quantum computing chip with 72 quantum bits, or qubits as they like to be called.
If this is genuinely true we are going to leap into a new era with a google computer able to outgun all existing computers.
What does this mean?
THERE WILL BE NO WAY OF REALLY KNOWING IF A QUANTUM COMPUTER PRODUCES CORRECT ANSWERS.
EVEN IF THE FINANCIAL COSTS OF DEVELOPING SUCH A COMPUTER ARE TREMENDOUS A QUANTUM COMPUTER WILL BE MUCH MORE THAN ITS PROCESSOR CAPABILITIES.
THE TRANSFORMATIVE EFFECTS ON SOCIETY WILL BE UNIMAGINABLE.
IT WILL ARM GOOGLE WITH POWER OVER HOW OUR WORLD WORKS.
SUCH A POWER CANNOT BE LEFT IN THE HANDS OF A GLOBAL MONOPOLY CALLED GOOGLE.
WHY?
BECAUSE: WE ARE JUST WITNESSING THE APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND WHO IT IS SHAPING OUR PERSONALIZED WORLD OUR ABILITY TO EARN A LIVING OUR INCREASINGLY ENTAILMENT BETWEEN MACHINE DRIVEN INTELLIGENCE AND PEOPLE POWER AND ALL THE ETHICAL QUESTIONS SURROUNDING AI
BECAUSE: A WORLD THAT WAKES UP EVERY MORNING UNABLE TO IMAGINE WHAT CAN BE BETTER WILL BE A DULL PLACE.
BECAUSE: WE ARE SETTING OURSELVES UP TO BE OUTSHONE BY TECHNOLOGY.
BECAUSE: THE AI UNIVERSE IS ALREADY CHANNELING THE WAY OUR WORLD ORGANISATIONS OPERATE.
SO WHERE ARE WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
THERE ARE NO GATEKEEPERS TO IDENTIFY THE EXPECTED SIDE EFFECTS OR UNINTENDED USES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
WE NEED TO START AGGRESSIVELY TARGETING THE DOWNSIDES OF NEW ALGORITHMS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE GOING TO PUSH HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OUT OF THE JOB MARKET AND CREATE AN INEQUALITY GAP SO BIG IN THE WORLD THAT THEY WILL IF LEFT TO SEEKING PROFIT WILL PUSH US ALL OVER THE BRINK.
WE CANNOT ALLOW SO MUCH POWER TO REST WITH ANYONE AUTHORITY OR MONOPOLY LIKE GOOGLE.
THE ONUS ON PROGRAMMERS IS TO BE TRANSPARENT. TO SHOW THE FULL PICTURE.
WE MUST ESTABLISH A TECHNOLOGICAL CLOUD BANK WHERE ALL PROGRAMMES ARE REQUIRED TO LODGE A COPY OF ANY PROGRAM WHETHER IT IS DEEMED BENEFICIAL OR NOT TO HUMANITY. ( See previous posts on the subject)
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
If we ever wanted more evidence that we are now on the cusp of an event that is going to have a disastrous effect on society we only have to look at what is happening in the world at the moment.
Every advance in technology is moving us further and further from our attachment to nature.
Years of Capitalism for profit has produced – Pollution/Waste/ Excessive production/ Wars/ Climate change and technology in the form of AI. All asking the question is Capitalism obsolete?
It is not working for the vast majority of humanity.
Now faced with the arrival of Artificial intelligence, which if not regulated will control market forces, with the super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires reaping the wealth of automation and profit-seeking algorithms to the detriment of us all.
The more AI advances into a general purpose technology that permeates every aspect of life the less sense it makes to allow it to remain in the private hands rather than of the many.
Indeed there is already a case for nationalizing AI.
Its very pervasiveness is invading not just democracy but our private and social lives. Causing wars and exploitation of not just us but our economies – High-Frequency Trading, Sovereign Wealth funds, Currency trading, Trade Agreements, down to what toilet paper you wipe your arse with.
Its inability to spread the wealth, to tackle inequality and poverty not to mention its exploitation of privacy and democracy have recently seen -FaceBook.
No company should be allowed to possess an exclusive cutting edge technology or core AI platform. Indeed with Deep learning, we are now beginning to see programmers feeding computers with learning algorithms that expose them to terabytes of data resulting in software writing software.
THERE IS NO DISPUTING THAT THE WORLD IS GOING TO NEED THE POWER OF AI TO RESOLVE FORTHCOMING PROBLEMS.
But it must serve society as a whole instead of the private capitalist operating in their own self- centered interests.
It must be brought under social control by Regulation with the creation of a virtual world strongroom, where a copy of all original AI algorithms, software programs are required by law to be lodged to be held and vetted re there compliance with our core values.
As I said in a previous post;
We need to create a class of ‘algorithmic auditors’ — trusted representatives of the public who can peer into the code to see what kinds of implicit political and ethical judgments are buried there and report their findings back to us.
This is a good idea, though it poses practical problems about how companies
can retain the commercial edge provided by their computerized secret sauce if
they have to open up their algorithms to quasi-official scrutiny.
It is very unlikely that this will happen. We are however in danger of
App exploitation not only for profit but when there is no immediate cash peril –
culture, education, and crime.
We are well on the road to becoming slaves to the algorithms with computers
taking more than some tough choices out of our hands if we let them.
God forbid that some form of AI manages to become self-aware.
Such automated augury might be considered relatively harmless if its use is
confined to figuring out what products we might like to buy. But it is not going
to stop there.
Amazon Echo machine-learning services are both a powerful revenue generator that is going to remove us from any commitment to society or nature that sustains us all.
A low-cost, ubiquitous computer with all its brains in the cloud that you could interact with over voice—you speak to it, it speaks to you.
As companies build their vital machine-learning tools inside AWS, the likelihood that they will move to competing for cloud operations becomes ridiculously remote.
All technology programmers whether they are Algorithms for profit or otherwise should under Law be required to submit a verified copy of the program to be held in a virtual world strongroom, accessible to all ensuring transparency and accountability.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
—————————————————————————————
So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
——
What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
There is no denying that the benefits of technology are needed but what are the downsides costs.
As the demand for up-to-date technology increases, we need to reevaluate how we measure the hidden cost of the TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION.
It will not be us picking up the tap, but the yet to be born that will have to pay, living in a world that is detached from what makes it all possible The Earth.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
At this point it is impossible to say with any authority what exactly the cost will be.
Some technologies are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop, but you should know about all of them right now. In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to print human organs, but not the brain.
According to Stephen Hawking, “Humans are entering a stage of self-designed evolution.”
That may be so, but technology is more than just fusing the physical and digital worlds.
Marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, face and voice recognition and algorithms learning from other algorithms.
With wireless connecting brain-reading technology directly to electrical stimulators on your body it has the potential with more items moving from physical to virtual to decouple us from reality. Wireless communications is already dominating our everyday lives
It is already impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries, our politics, improving medicine, influencing our culture.
Apart from the obvious technology is also in the process of changing democracy, moving capitalism underground, assisting conflicts, packaging natural resources, destabilizing society, disrupt the way governments deliver services to citizens, just to mention the tip of the ice berg.
.It will not be long before we will all have DNA maps from birth.
However with the arrival of Quantum computers the way we use technology will be reshape, along with the societies we live in.
As soon as two to five years from now, such systems or time on such systems are likely to be for sale.
There are probably plenty more uses for quantum computers that nobody has thought up yet.
However you may rest assured that the ordinary citizens (or even governments) won’t be able to own their own quantum computers for a long time, if ever, but I can imagine large companies renting time (measured in fractions of seconds) to whoever needs their services.
With this in mind the race has well started to create monopolies of knowledge Google, of Social Media Society – Facebook, consumerism E Bay, Amazon, Alibaba, of Finance – Pay Pal, of Communication – Apple, of Biotech Thermo Fisher Scientific, of cloud business – Microsoft -IBM, Oracle, of computer microchips to data center-makers-Intel, to name just a few.
Here are a few of their Mission statements:
Facebook: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
Amazon: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”
Pay Pal: “To build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”
Alibaba: “To make it easy to do business anywhere.”
Google: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Microsoft: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
United Nations: “The maintenance of international peace and security.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres: “To help people worldwide where the need is greatest, delivering emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care.”
Non mention the health of the EARTH?
Disruptive technology is, by its very nature, unpredictable but we’ll see more intelligence built into communication. With always-on connectivity, social networking has the power to change cultures, as we saw with the Egyptian Revolution, which led to the Arab Spring.
The results of changing the world are often complicated and unpredictable.
With the technology of smart phones social influences will continue to move rapidly between cultures.
In the broadest sense, technology extends our abilities to change the world: to cut, shape, or put together materials; to move things from one place to another; to reach farther with our hands, voices, and senses. We use technology to try to change the world to suit us better. The changes may relate to survival needs such as food, shelter, or defense, or they may relate to human aspirations such as knowledge, art, or control.
As computational power rises exponentially, not linearly, so does the rate of change — and that means the next 10 years should pack in far more technological change than the last 10.
It is my prediction that all of it will end up in the cloud.
Why?
Because it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of our brains (driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex) that is driving technology to tap into our personal sensors.
Make no mistake: emails, Facebook and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
Already, the cloud is powerful enough to help us communicate through real-time language translation.
When is a profit not a profit? When it turns into a monopoly exploiting all around it.
Just like Capitalism technology it is unable to regulate itself and with the arrival of Quantum computers it will make everything and everybody beholden to technology, endangering much of the openness that we now enjoy online.
So I one again ask the question:
Is it time to regulate Algorithms that have profit as their end targets and is it time that we demanded an open data website that would allow anyone to find information on a host of county government programs, from budget information to welfare data to crime statistics.
This would be linked to two powerful benefits.
First, it makes government more transparent and understandable at a time when trust in the public sector has plummeted.
Second, it has the potential to generate significant economic benefits impacting budget issues, public safety and education, transparency and economic value for tax payers money.
The bottom line is that government data can be extremely valuable for public consumption, but only if the policies behind the data are well thought out and the related costs are affordable. For instance, would a map of society reveal awkward disparities in how rich and poor neighborhoods receive public funding?
Many governments are running on old, outdated systems, making them vulnerable to cyber attacks.
I believe that such an open based data website would benefit from the collective wisdom of the community, simplify how citizens and businesses interact with the state.
However IT WOULD HAVE THE unexpected startup costs if data is kept in a legacy computer system that requires reformatting; quality-related costs to keep open data fresh and up-to-date; legal costs to comply with open data legislation; liability costs in case something goes wrong, such as publication of nonpublic information; and public relations costs that can occur when a jurisdiction generates bad press from open data about poor performance metrics or workforce diversity problems.
That apart present technological advances and information overlays will change how we live in significant ways.
We will have a so-called “smart grid” where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems, allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand. Such a universal method for identifying someone energy requirements becomes much harder when you no longer have a central authority to figure out how to link together the different systems.
It will not be like self-driving trucks with lidar system guidance run by algorithms or self-driving cars.
Who is responsible when the self drive truck or car kills someone. Try bringing a self thought Algorithm to court.
Try suing an Face-detecting systems for wrong identification or payment.
Then we have: Gene-therapy.
Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Three technologies are coming together to make this new type of mapping possible.
The first is known as “cellular microfluidics.” Individual cells are separated, tagged with tiny beads, and manipulated in droplets of oil that are shunted like cars down the narrow, one-way streets of artificial capillaries etched into a tiny chip, so they can be corralled, cracked open, and studied one by one.
The second is the ability to identify the genes active in single cells by decoding them in superfast and efficient sequencing machines at a cost of just a few cents per cell. One scientist can now process 10,000 cells in a single day.
The third technology uses novel labeling and staining techniques that can locate each type of cell—on the basis of its gene activity—at a specific zip code in a human organ or tissue.
Then we have, the relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
Then we have, Botnets are used to commit click fraud.
Google ads pay a site owner according to the number of people who click on them. The attacker instructs all the computers on his botnet to repeatedly visit the Web page and click on the ad. Dot, dot, dot, PROFIT! If the botnet makers figure out more effective ways to siphon revenue from big companies online, we could see the whole advertising model of the Internet crumble.
Then we have, hackers breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. The problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.”
Then we have, reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning may soon inject greater intelligence into much more than games.
SO WHAT NOW?
What are the implications to human development and the diversity of life on earth? What opportunities are there to reduce risks and vulnerabilities, enhance resilience, and create transformations to prosperous and equitable futures?
Science can provide only some answers; it is not a panacea for all problems. We need to also make personal, economic, social, and political changes, whatever the cost will be.
Reinforcement-learning algorithm can learn from collated data and experiment in simulation to suggest, say, how and when to operate the cooling systems.
Algorithms don’t know the Meaning of Environment.
They have however so concept of the “The term ‘environment’ it refers to all external conditions and factors that affect living organisms. Here external factors mean all the things around us such as air, water, light, animals, humans etc.
Algorithms are shadow boxers of yesterday all because technology trends can affect the bottom line of business.
Although big data algorithms hold great promise, they should still be approached with caution and skepticism.
For instance Algorithms should not be relied upon to ration medical care until the technology has substantially matured.
If we ignore what is happening there will be more riots, and increasing divisions along economic, religious and ethnic lines with Robots completely replacing humans in the workforce.
IT IS TIME FOR THE OWNERS ALL PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS TO BE REGISTERED WITH A COPY OF THE WORKING CODE. NO PROFIT EARNING ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE GRANTED A PATIENT.
All human comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ITS ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE REGULATED.
Up to now man has exploited almost every opportunity that has come his way to make profit.
In theory you could lay the blame for all our present day troubles on a plant that exploited man – Wheat – in which man invested, time, labor, energy, power and money.
The next exploitation will not be a plant that we are all biological connected to. It will be an innate object called a micro chip turned into Algorithms.
In recent years we are just beginning to release that there is going to be a fundamental change to the ways we will be living our lives in the future.
Our modern global economy struggles with the challenge of using limited natural resources without exhausting them and we are just beginning to value lower life forms, perhaps because we are going to become one.
If and when computer programs attain super human intelligence with unprecedented power should we begin to value these microchip programs more than we value humans?
Would it be acceptable for artificial intelligence in the form of unsupervised Algorithms to exploit us and the earth?
If it is ethical for humans to exploit so must it be for AI.
This is what is taking place with Capitalist Algorithms that are designed to exploit greed.
Giant Tech like Google and Baidu are spending billions on the race for patents and intellectual property rights, combined with external funds (also in the billions) they are on a mission to privatizing the future.
In 2016, the AI market was worth just $644 million. This year (2017) that amount nearly double. Growing exponentially from there, AI is expanding its reach outside of the technology sector, nature and what it provides us all with is a risk of exploitation.
It is now or never if we are to avoid dismal subjugation to continuing exploitation. There’s no turning back now.
Apple has become an icon of American capitalism, technological innovation, and shareholder wealth creation.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact path that AI will take, but there is one thing for sure – It’s Time to Take AI Seriously.
A small, lucky handful of early movers will ride it to untold riches in the Cloud with Quantum Computing, which will result in the ultimate decoupling of humanity from individualism and nature, turning existence itself into mathematical patterns.
In the next five years artificial intelligence will exist as a layer of capability atop every business process, from customer service and marketing to product development and sales, across every industry.
This can be seen already with hungry money putting a monetary values on nature, as it commences to aid and abet, (failing to convey “real” ecological value or reasons for conservation) the packaging of fresh water, scarce resources, energy, etc.
Rest assured Google with biochemical algorithms will know you from the day you are born. Google was not born yesterday, nor was Twitter/Facebook, there comments or like algorithms can already predict your opinions and desires and will perhaps make important life decision on your behalf such as electing the next D Trump.
By the time the rest of us find out about the phenomenon, it’s too late.
It’s already hard to design regulations that ensure we don’t over farm the land, don’t over fish the seas, don’t over cut the forests and don’t take too much water from our rivers and aquifers.
It is not hard to subject all emerging AI to examination. To hold a copy of their software, before they degrade our humanity further. (See previous posts)
Technology is arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.
While there are numerous natural resources that are being capitalized upon all across the world we are all so preoccupied committing communal suicide on our smart phones, that we are now unintentionally buying into technology that is not going to save the planet but rape it.
Hungry investment money sole purpose is profit.
If you were expecting some kind of warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
Our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world are now acquiring the very essence of what makes the world tick. To the extent we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world we’ve made.
Online trading algorithms that are increasingly controlling markets, stock exchanges, feeding on data to exploit any weakness, while Google’s data-crunching algorithm harvesting our personal data and shape the web we see accordingly. Changing the way humans think. As its code gets ever more sophisticated it is reaching its tentacles into all aspects of our lives, including our cultural preferences.
We have to challenge investments which are driven by AI algorithms if they are based on Profit.
Why?
Because they are packing nature into investment portfolios, which are going to cause more and more conflict in the world.
Take the Paris Climate Change agreement to limit Co2. Worthless!
Because Hungry Money is undermining true conservation investment, and climate change incentives, turning them into emissions trading, commonly referred to as cap-and-trade, embodies commodification of nature in that it allows for the trade of pollution and emissions within a given limit for a specific environment.
Rather than simply outright prohibiting or allowing pollution and other various negative externalities, cap-and-trade essentially permits members of an industry to buy and sell units of emission with a maximum set for the industry as a whole.
Isn’t there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out non market norms in almost every aspect of life-medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations.
Without quite realizing it, we are drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Technology and AI are undermining current economic systems with profits that do not contributing to any conservation or sustainability.
Tourist paradises have sprung up in places of high biodiversity, offering exclusivity to their owners and clients while violating agrarian rights, creating social conflict, and destroying ecosystems.
Gigantic cruse Ships bring hordes of App driven city slickers to UNESCO Sites destroying them like Venice, to the Antarctic, to African natural protected areas (in zones of predominantly private property), giving them exclusive rights and increasing real estate values and investments in tourism.
While good governance can be an end in itself, the link between good
governance and poverty reduction is much more complex, and can be obscured by the intrusion of political agendas.
Absentee owners rarely have the same sense of stewardship and restraint as local owners.
What we don’t seem to be able to grasp is that we, every one of us is the Universe. It flows through all of us, not through AI, or platforms driven by profit seeking Algorithms.
They will never be connected like us to it, with or without a conscious.
As algorithms spread their influence beyond machines to shape the raw landscape around them, it might be time to work out exactly how much they know and whether we still have time to tame them.
The parameters used to define “money.”
Who believe money refers only to currencies such as bank notes, coins, and money deposited in savings or checking accounts, digital currency bitcoin, above-ground gold supply, and funds invested in various financial products.
The world isn’t that simple anymore, what Money Can’t Buy is now out of control thanks to AI.
If we are to make this new World of technology work we must apply a World Aid commission on all Algorithms that are designed for profit. ( See previous posts)
There will be little use in walking around a world with Smart phones, Ipads, if we cannot unite before we all vanish into the cloud of exploitation.
You be the :
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We all know that the present crisis in European Union has freighting potential to undermine all our lives?
The problem is that despite all the rhetoric Wall Street and World Stock Markets underpin the hard nose of business with the priesthood of economists.
Financial experts and commentators worshiping it worldwide as a God.
Leaving us incapable of grasping that at one point in human history the Laws of the market can only be a human construction which now seen as absolute – even when they clearly do not work.
The high priests of today oblivious to the anti-market nature of their behavior do not hesitate to intervene to fix it on a colossal scale in contravention of the market’s own precepts.
The idea that money-making is the primary Goal of the most admired people in Society, the Goal of our Nations economic philosophies, the G 20, the European Union, our education, combined with our central defining consumerism greed is back firing.
What we got is the results that we see today:
Quantitative Easing, Money Printing /Austerity/ /Germany bailouts /Guarantees/ Banks before people Interest fixing /Elections/ Unemployment/ Bonuses/Tax confusion/ Independent Referendums, all served up with large daily doses of verbal diarrhea by every expert that has written a book.
I have not written any book on the subject and I am no expert but I am beginning to wake up to the need for our Captains of Industry, our political leaders and business to realize that competitiveness is not all that it is dressed up to be.
It can severely impair a given country’s ability to choose its own social and economic destiny and our individuality.
No currency can set the boundaries of a nation.
So it is worth reminding ourselves how grandiose the dreams of the European Union founders were.
Our present world can be seen as full of conflict, pain, misery, wars, while across the world ecological, economic and political spaces are being enclosed through privateering, Algorithms, liberalization and globalization and the hidden purchasing power of Sovereign Funds – All breeding new insecurities anxieties and stresses.
In this world Europe was renamed the European Common Market with its inhabitants viewed chiefly in economic terms, as producers or consumers, not countries with vastly different histories, problems, and circumstances.
The notion that trade and wealth creation would create a Europe laisser-faire was not basis on its history but on a vague notion that togetherness would make us less likely to repeat World War One /Two.
Reducing our society to markets and us humans to consumers.
Those that are rich have status and those who are poor do not.
You only have to read a newspaper to see how the overpaid footballers, film and soap star, business people are held up to be admired. While we the people fooled by capitalism that has made work the center of our lives and are now in the process of destroying it as a satisfying meaningful activity through the world stock exchanges that are driven by algorithms that determine whether we should retire at 63, 65, and 68 remain voiceless.
As a Species we have basis needs for meaning of identity, for community, and security, for food water and freedom.
So it stands to reason to prevent our collectively insane political leaders terminating life in Europe never mind the earth that we need to do something.
We all know that banks can’t stop themselves. Bail them out by all means but only under strict regulations.
If we in Europe want to avoid a repeat of the wars that devastated the Continent in the past all that is required (a saving of trillions) is a united military European Army. This will provide Europe with reasonably secure environment, safe from the threat of major war with its countries being let find their own versions of modernity or not to modernize at all.
Europe does not need a free market to thrive.
How can we achieve this?
There is only one solution scrap the Euro and let each country set its own exchange rates according to its own GDP (without the tanks, planes, nuclear weapons) set against the value of human resources, social capital, and ecological assets.
The present melt down of the EU could not have come at a better time.
If we do not preserve the Capital of Europe its different cultures /languages/ history and the like there will be no Economics.
We all know that economic is not a science however each time history repeats its self the price goes up.
The Euro is fundamental flawed and please god will remain so to protect what is the very essence of living or being born in Europe.
It’s time we all realize that the Natural Capital of the world, water, clean air, oceans, forests have to be protected so we must pay the keepers of the natural capital if we as humans are to live at all.
So let’s start in Europe with some common European aspirations.
Self sufficiency in Power- creates a common European kilowatt price: Abolish road tolls: Proper periphery border controls: Freedom of movement of currencies within the market – abolish commission charges: European Youth employment programs: European health / pension Euro bonds backed by all countries – to mention a few.
God knows it not difficult to identify what is needed, just attached the words total transparency to any common Goal and it will be achieved without Greed.
We all know or at least we should all be aware that our world is becoming less and less transparent thanks to what we call Artificial Intelligence.
The challenge there is:
The false promise of the Internet was that it can connect people from different backgrounds, with different beliefs and across disparate locations.
The trend toward personalization by AI is impeding the fulfillment of that promise?
What is becoming more and more apparent is that while most personalization on the web is algorithmically driven, aren’t we implicitly, informing the algorithms based on the choices we’ve previously made interacting with content?
Couldn’t you then, in theory, manipulate the filter so you see what you want to see or are there too many factors beyond our control?
Consider:
Even if you’re completely logged out of Google, on a new computer, the company can track 57 signals about you — from what kind of laptop you’re using to what your IP address is to what the font size in your browser is. Already, that gives a lot of important clues about age, income and demographics.
It’s ironic — the promise of personalization is that it gives us our own personal view of the world.
But the challenge is that a lot of the time, it’s actually pushing us toward a stereotyped, simplified version of ourselves: “This person is male, so we’ll show him more gadget and car news.”
So let me ask you.
Many of the major social, discovery and media sites on the Internet now implement some type of personalization. Do you feel these sites have a responsibility to educate consumers about how their information is being filtered? Do you think users should be able to opt out of personalization?
I would say Yes, on both counts.
In an increasingly complex and vast media landscape it is crucial that me maintain our private lives.
Why?
Because: Algorithms of all shapes and sizes are monitoring, analyzing, making
decisions, dictating our credit scores etc. They are shaping our lives and economies, our future, so shouldn’t we know what code and mathematical equations, or deep learning go into making them work.
However Transparency alone won’t help.
Algorithms are complicated so exposing the code behind them won’t make them more understandable. Knowing how an algorithm is coded is useless without knowing the data that has being fed into it in the first place.
There is only one solution and that is the:
The Creation of a New World Organisation that is totally transparent, and self financing: To vet all Technology. To ensure that they comply with the core world gold standard of human values.
(See previous Posts)
Let me ask you two further questions.
Can some level of personalization be useful?
What are we missing that we need to see?
Some amount of algorithmic personalization is necessary — there’s just too much stuff to sort through for humans to do it all. However you don’t know who Google thinks you are or on what basis it’s editing your results, and therefore you don’t know what you’re missing.
A lot of the personalization that exists today just serves up information junk food, but a growing portion is being curated by robots — computer algorithms that are filtering content and deciding what we get to see.
It may be delicious, but it doesn’t feed the soul.
Now it’s possible to live in a bubble where that stuff doesn’t ever show up — you’d never know it’s happening.
Take the Facebook “Like” button — the main way that information gets spread on Facebook. “Like” isn’t a neutral word — it’s easy to Like “I just finished a marathon,” and hard to Like “cell phones may cause cancer.”
So some kinds of information get through, and others don’t, and when that’s happening in the Facebook News Feed, where an increasing number of folks get their news, it’s a real problem.
Most people aren’t aware that their Google search results, Yahoo News links, or Facebook feed is being tailored in this way.
Filters can provide relevance and combat information overload, but with so much riding on automated decisions to ensure algorithms deal with humans fairly is now more relevant than ever.
I recently read that in five-year your smartphone could be reading your mind.
Brain- computer interface.
Personalization couldn’t exist without the massive dossiers of personal data being collected by big companies online these days. And it’s a problem because consumers don’t have much control over that.
The current laws around personal data just don’t contemplate a world in which a click on one website changes what you see on an entirely different one.
Almost all popular websites, from search engines to social networks to media outlets, are now utilizing filters in some way to personalize content for visitors.
When websites show us only what we like, we get cut off from the diverse points of view that can enrich our understanding of the world.
We get Donald Trumps.
Privacy is about controlling what the world is allowed to know about you. This is about controlling what you’re able to see of the world — what your filters let through and what they don’t.
Its time to wake up.
We can lose sight of our common problems, but they don’t lose sight of us.
It’s only a matter of time before our Fidelity/ Loyalty cards are linked up to our personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social media. If not already.
We will then be looking at citizen character score, which will bring credit scores to a whole new level, turning them more into to life scores, by tracking anything and everything we do. The scary bit is what is tracked and by who.
I hear you saying that this will never be accepted.
It is already on the cards for people living in China and Singapore. Humans and robot algorithms, living in peaceful harmony. Where you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence, how your friends rate you.
The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, but could be used in a vast array of applications and organisations such as Governments, Benefits, Hospital Operations, Visa, Education, down to all fields that makes Society including prison sentences, landlords, employers, and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.
All stored in the Cloud. Which comes in many different models forms.
Ubiquitous access to the network: Self-service and on-demand access to computing capabilities. This service will most often be performed by the service provider automatically without the need for human interaction.
Cloud Computers is not the easiest of terms to define, or explain what it all actually means. Owned by Google, Twitter, Gmail and Facebook the Cloud is elusive as grabbing a cloud itself.
Perhaps we can blame it all on Leonhard Euler one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, and also a prolific inventor of canonical notation.
( An Euler path is a path that uses every edge of a graph exactly once.)
One way or the other to use a Trumpetism: It’s ain’t going to be great unless we build algorithms that have a sense of civic purpose embedded in them, giving us both entertainment and the information we really need, not profit.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
O sorry about the line spacing in this post just cannot figure out how to correct it.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
