It appears that at least some senior leadership at Google are flouting the “Don’t be Evil” principle of the founders.
Via Bliss Morgan.
Originally shared by Cindy Brown
Holy moly!
Our own Yonatan Zunger has words.
I think I’m going to be pulling further back from google products.
Originally shared by Anne-Marie Clark
Berliners have shown how to stop the march of the far right
“The demise of German fascist group Wir für Deutschland shows that citizens can unite to banish hatred”
…
“Something significant has just occurred in Berlin. The far-right group Wir für Deutschland (We for Germany), which has been marching in the capital since 2016, has just announced that it will no longer protest there. Explaining the decision in a frustration-filled statement on Facebook, Wir für Deutschland credited three factors in particular…”
It’s good to see that people are thinking, and thinking deeply, about the unintended consequences of technology.
It’s especially good to see something (in the last point in the article) which reflects one of my own ideas: the Advisor Against, a person (or, in this case, board) whose job is specifically to point out the pitfalls of a proposed course of action. (The Advisor Against appears in my novel Realmgolds.)
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Managing the Unintended Consequences of Technology
Via Deborah Teramis Christian.
A long piece with a simple message: human connection makes a difference.
Originally shared by ****
“I think people die when they feel completely alone.”
The most pivotal response was sent by a study participant who lived in an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The man, who 18 months earlier had written a “kiss-off” letter, now described himself as a broken vase held together by his own hands. His letter spanned five single-spaced typed pages and read as if it had taken days to write. Forty years later, Motto could remember the first sentence: “You are the most persistent son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever encountered, so you must really be sincere in your interest in me.” There it was, a perfect encapsulation of the study’s aims. Motto called it “the bingo letter.”
After about four years, Motto and his team had enough data to determine that their work was unprecedented in the history of suicide research. In the first two years following hospitalization, the suicide rate of the control group was nearly twice as high as that of the contact group. And it wasn’t only that no other experiment had ever been able to show a reduction in suicide deaths. Motto had also demonstrated something more profound: People who attempted suicide and wanted nothing to do with the mental health system could still be reached.
Ignore the bit about the bones; they’re confused.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Custom-Grown Bones, and Other Wild Advances in Regenerative Medicine
It’s good to see that these questions are being considered ahead of the (inevitable, at this stage) widespread adoption of deep-learning systems for essential tasks.
Originally shared by Raja Mitra
Three ways to avoid bias in machine learning.
Sears (the man) was a brilliant marketer. He deliberately made his catalog slightly narrower and shorter than the Montgomery Ward catalog – his competitor – so that a tidy person would naturally put it on top when stacking them.
Apparently, when he and his partner discovered that their catalog was enabling black people to buy things that in-person retail wasn’t permitting them to buy, he said, in effect, “Why not?” and took steps to make it easier. For business reasons, but it turned out to benefit people as well.
Originally shared by Keith Wilson
Making public transport free drops the friction to the point that a lot more people use it. It’s not without its controversy, though.
(Inspired by the Estonian city mentioned in the article, I put free trams in my fictional capital of New Koslinmouth in my most recently completed novel.)
Originally shared by Amanda Park
Different perspective than most of North America
The answer, apparently, is science fiction.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Leading Transformation in a World of Uncertainty
This is exciting; it might even enable the fix to social media I proposed a while back (http://csidemedia.com/gryphonclerks/2018/01/09/fixing-social-media-part-1-the-big-fix/), in which you’re in control of your content, where it’s posted, and how you consume others’ content.
Originally shared by John Ward
This is promising. Tim Berners-Lee is trying to create an infrastructure that would allow people to own and control their data instead of trusting it to the many companies who buy and sell every bit of your personal information they can get. From the article:
When asked about this, Berners-Lee says flatly: “We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are not asking their permission.”