Prof-Stephen-Hawking comments on Science AMA Series: Stephen Hawking AMA Answers! Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel Ubik on the Internet of Things. Photo illustration by Slate.
Photos by Thinkstock. Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send what the television hears to a third-party company. The television doesn’t watch you watch it back, but it is listening. Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of televisions, tells customers in its privacy policy that “personal or other sensitive” conversations “will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party” through the TV’s voice-recognition software.
How Much Longer Before Companies Start To Run Themselves? Someone I know has held this theory for a while, that big companies are already AIs, just that the computation is done by Mechanical Turk.
Plutocracy. Political Philosophy. Democracy and Political Ignorance. Democracy is supposed to be rule of the people, by the people, and for the people.
But in order to rule effectively, the people need political knowledge. If they know little or nothing about government, it becomes difficult to hold political leaders accountable for their performance. Unfortunately, public knowledge about politics is disturbingly low. In addition, the public also often does a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. This state of affairs has persisted despite rising education levels, increased availability of information thanks to modern technology, and even rising IQ scores. The Extent of Ignorance Political ignorance in America is deep and widespread.
Even Mathematically Literate People Become Innumerate when they Focus on Political Issues. At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum and Chris Mooney have interesting posts discussing a new paper by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his coauthors, which finds that even people who are generally good at interpreting statistics act as if they are innumerate when faced with data that goes against their political views.
Mooney summarizes the results as follows: The study…. has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their “numeracy,” that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. Invaders from Mars. "Voting doesn't change anything — the politicians always win.
" 'Twas not always so, but I'm hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK. Youtube. Le Future According To Val Part 2: Consequences. Cyberpunk: The Dystopian Prism with Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and more great speakers! 12 Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World. Is the Internet good or bad? Yes. — Matter. I WAS IN PHILADELPHIA WHEN the protests in Istanbul exploded, at a gathering called Data-Crunched Democracy, hosted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
The dystopia of 1984 is no longer relevant. The Robots Are Here - POLITICO Magazine. Isaac Asimov, the astonishingly prolific science fiction writer, died in 1992, but he foresaw much about American politics today.
_Z_E_R_O comments on Bill Gates: People Don't Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software Bots.