Archive (Page 3 of 5)

Are We Living Inside an Ethical (and Kind) Machine?

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.

Sleepwalking into Surveillant Capitalism, Sliding into Authoritarianism

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.

AI Threats to Civil Liberties and Democracy

In a world of con­flict­ing val­ues, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult to devel­op val­ues for AI that are not the low­est com­mon denominator.

Surveillance and Race Online

[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.

The Conversation #45 — James Bamford

You’re not going to get a gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple out­raged that some­body’s read­ing their email like you would’ve in the 70s get­ting a gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple out­raged that you’re read­ing their snail mail.

Online Platforms as Human Rights Arbiters

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?

Richard Stallman’s Internet Hall of Fame 2013 Induction Speech

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.

Decoding Workforce Productivity: Nita A. Farahany

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?

Forbidden Research: Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance

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.

Forbidden Research Welcome and Introduction: Cory Doctorow

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.