This is a moment to ask as we make the planet digital, as we totally envelop ourselves in the computing environment that we’ve been building for the last hundred years, what kind of digital planet do we want? Because we are at a point where there is no turning back, and getting to ethical decisions, values decisions, decisions about democracy, is not something we have talked about enough nor in a way that has had impact.
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We have increasingly smart, surveillant persuasion architectures. Architectures aimed at persuading us to do something. At the moment it’s clicking on an ad. And that seems like a waste. We’re just clicking on an ad. You know. It’s kind of a waste of our energy. But increasingly it is going to be persuading us to support something, to think of something, to imagine something.
In a world of conflicting values, it’s going to be difficult to develop values for AI that are not the lowest common denominator.
[The] question of what happens when blackness enters the frame can kind of neatly encapsulate the ways I’ve been thinking and trying to talk about surveillance for the last few years.
What does it mean for human rights protection that we have large corporate interests—the Googles, the Facebooks of our time—that control and govern a large part of the online infrastructure?
So, thirty years ago if you wanted to get a new computer and use it you had to surrender your freedom by installing a user-subjugating proprietary operating system. So I decided to fix that by developing another operating system and make it free, and it’s called GNU, but most the time you’ll hear people erroneously calling it Linux.
Are there any limits to the connected workplace? Are there any concerns about the connected workplace? Is there any way in which you wouldn’t want either yourself or an employee to be connected? Are there any limits to the kinds of information we can gather in order to make our workforces more productive? In order to make our overall society more productive?
When I announced the talk on Twitter, somebody immediately was like, “Lawful abuse, isn’t that a contradiction?” But if you think about it for just a moment it might seem to be a little bit more clear. After all, the legality of a thing is quite distinct from the morality of it.
At that moment when everybody is suddenly caring about this stuff, that’s the moment at which nihilism can be averted. It’s the moment in which nihilism must be averted if you’re going to make a change. Peak indifference is the moment when you stop convincing people to care about an issue, and start convincing them to do something about it.