Search engines aren't the innocent, objective tools they pretend to be. Instead, as author Safiya Umoja Noble argues: “They include decision-making protocols that favor corporate elites and the powerful, and they are implicated in global economic and social inequality.”
"Technology can be used to self-determine as long as we can control it. If it continues to belong to the privileged and powerful, we will always be struggling with it."
In the spirit of Gil Scott-Heron, a half century and a technological transformation later.
Two years ago, Reddit held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942-March 14, 2018). In this session the renowned physicist talked about the promise and risk of AI, technological unemployment, and more.
Soon, speaking and typing may be old-fashioned forms of communication. The new wave of Silicon Valley products will use your brain as the interface. Will bioethicists be able to control the new technology?
While sexual harassment is certainly an issue, we need to look deeper at gender bias. Women who do make it to the upper ranks have often been told that they were only given that job or that award because they are women, implying that the field is admitting less-deserving women simply to increase their numbers. In fact, these studies show that many of the women in science must be more capable than the men, to even have advanced in the field. And who wants to admit that?
One of Black Mirror’s great accomplishments is that it can make you feel rotten dread about where the most mundane parts of your life could take you in 10 years — your smartphone, your Facebook account, your TV.
Contrary to a too-commonly held assumption, book author Anne Trubeck argues that while writing by hand will likely become less practiced, it will not disappear, but evolve, as she insists its variegated world history amply shows. Just one possible precedent: the metamorphosis of letterpress printing into an artisanal form.
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.
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