#digutalwisdom

[forkeepingtime]

“Writing just a year before arpanet went live, the Harvard information scientist Anthony Oettinger envisions “a kind of gargantuan version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex”—a hypothetical electromechanical text and audio-visual reader—which is about as good a summary of the Internet as you can find from 1968. But Oettinger, a veteran of U.S. intelligence-panel work on information overload, was no Utopian: his essay is titled “Electronics May Revolutionize Education, But Is Unlikely to Solve Problems of Human Frailty.” He’s particularly skeptical of how well governments would adapt to this mega-Memex: “Putting broad-band communications, picture telephones, and instant computerized retrieval in the hands of such an organization is like feeding pastry to a fat man.” It is “much too optimistic” to assume that these same technologies would entail the ability to use them wisely. “Applying technology, like all human efforts,” Oettinger warns, “bears bittersweet fruits.””

The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-1968-book-that-tried-to-predict-the-world-of-2018

[forkeepingtime]

“Technologies are not ethically ‘neutral’, for they reflect the values that we ‘bake in’ to them with our design choices, as well as the values which guide our distribution and use of them. Technologies both reveal and shape what humans value, what we think is ‘good’ in life and worth seeking.

Of course, this always been true; technology has never been separate from our ideas about the good life. We don’t build or invest in a technology hoping it will make no one’s life better, or hoping that it makes all our lives worse. So what is new, then? Why is ethics now such an important topic in technical contexts, more so than ever?

The answer has partly to do with the unprecedented speeds, scales and pervasiveness with which technical advances are transforming the social fabric of our lives, and the inability of regulators and lawmakers to keep up with these changes. Laws and regulations have historically been important instruments of preserving the good life within a society, but today they are being outpaced by the speed, scale, and complexity of new technological developments and their increasingly pervasive and hard-to-predict social impacts.”

https://www.scu.edu/media/ethics-center/technology-ethics/DataEthicslastEdit-1.pdf

[forkeepingtime]

“The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. ... The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them.”

https://t.co/rYhsSGVdAD

[forkeepingtime]

“we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. ... We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news”

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/fake-news-2016.pdf

[forkeepingtime]

“the convergence of developments in neurotechnologies and AI would offer something qualitatively different — the direct linking of people's brains to machine intelligence, and the bypassing of the normal sensorimotor functions of brains and bodies. ... As neurotechnologies develop and corporations, governments and others start striving to endow people with new capabilities, individual identity (our bodily and mental integrity) and agency (our ability to choose our actions) must be protected as basic human rights.”

https://www.nature.com/news/four-ethical-priorities-for-neurotechnologies-and-ai-1.22960

[forkeepingtime]

“The number of Second Life users peaked just as Facebook started to explode. The rise of Facebook wasn’t the problem of a competing brand so much as the problem of a competing model: It seemed that people wanted a curated version of real life more than they wanted another life entirely—that they wanted to become their most flattering profile picture more than they wanted to become a wholly separate avatar. But maybe Facebook and Second Life aren’t so different in their appeal. Both find traction in the allure of inhabiting a selective self, whether built from the materials of lived experience (camping-trip photos and witty observations about brunch) or from the impossibilities that lived experience precludes: an ideal body, an ideal romance, an ideal home.”

The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/

[forkeepingtime]

“Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time.”

‪Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information @SSRN https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3048994#.WgXI25pl2Tc.twitter‬

[forkeepingtime]

“it is the overall paying of attention, not the specific information, that matters. The more people use their addictive-by-design social media, the more attention social-media companies can sell to advertisers—and the more data about the users’ behaviour they can collect for themselves ... the nature or meaning of the information being delivered does not matter all that much, as long as some attention is being paid.”

‪Less Euromaidan, more Gamergate: Once considered a boon to democracy, social media have started to look like its nemesis https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21730870-economy-based-attention-easily-gamed-once-considered-boon-democracy-social-media