Artificial intelligence is the science and engineering of making computers behave in ways that, until recently, we thought required human intelligence.
Zuckerberg’s politics: Facebook Über Alles
Robust commentary from Siva Vaidhyanathan after the news that Zuckerberg has had two secret dinners with Trump in the White House:
At the very moment when the US House of Representatives reveals overwhelming evidence that Trump used his power as president to support his re-election campaign and bolster his friend Vladimir Putin by withholding support from Ukraine, Zuckerberg continues to treat the Trump White House as just another potential regulator who must be charmed.
Zuckerberg’s politics favor two things: the interests of Facebook and people like him. So it’s no wonder Zuckerberg got close to the two American presidents who have served over his company’s history. Since the world abandoned its mindless worship of Facebook and Silicon Valley in recent years, Zuckerberg has been on a constant if unsuccessful campaign to save face and stem efforts to regulate or fracture his company.
So the problem with Zuckerberg’s politics is not just that they seem to have turned to the right. His politics have not changed at all. The world has. The problem is that by choosing an amoral set of principles and positions he has become deeply immoral.
Linkblog
- The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence Terrific article by Julia Powles and Helen Nissenbaum.
- Uber loses its London licence Aw shucks.
- Free eBook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Clever and innovative teaching text by Michael Nielsen. If you find it useful donate £5.
- Robot debates humans about the dangers of artificial intelligence In the Cambridge Union, so perhaps not an entirely serious forum.
Google grows and grows and becomes… just another corporation
From today’s New York Times:
SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Monday fired four employees who had been active in labor organizing at the company, according to a memo that was seen by The New York Times.
The memo, sent by Google’s security and investigations team, told employees that the company had dismissed four employees “for clear and repeated violations of our data security policies.” Jenn Kaiser, a Google spokeswoman, confirmed the firings but declined to elaborate.
The dismissals are expected to exacerbate rocky relations between Google’s management and a vocal contingent of workers who have protested the company’s handling of sexual harassment, its treatment of contract employees, and its work with the Defense Department, federal border agencies and the Chinese government…
If there are two things tech giants cannot stand, they’re regulation and trade unions.
Quote of the Day
”The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”
- E.M. Forster
Linkblog
- Date with IKEA Drew Austin’s reflections on store design.
- Five Ways Entrepreneurs Misunderstand VCs That’s Venture Capitalists, by the way, not holders of the Victoria Cross.
- What should newsrooms do about deepfakes? These three things, for starters Rather interesting deepfake at the head of the article, though.
- Here’s a better way to convert dog years to human years, scientists say It’s not the old simple rule-of-thumb of seven to one, apparently. Maths warning: Logarithms are involved.
Oxford, like the past, is another country
In a sense, that’s true — Oxford (like Cambridge) is locked in a bubble of privilege and prosperity. But my Observer colleague Kenan Malik’s experience reinforces that truism. “ I never thought I’d have to produce a passport travelling from London to Oxford,” he writes,
Until last week, that is. I was giving a talk at an Oxford college. “Bring your passport,” I was told. “The government has made employers legally responsible for ensuring that anyone who works for them has the right to do so. We need to see your passport before you can begin teaching.”
It was a shocking and outrageous demand and not one I’ve received from any other college, Oxford or otherwise, yet perfectly understandable within the context of the government’s “hostile environment” policy that has turned universities, hospitals, schools, landlords, employers, even homeless charities, into immigration police and created a climate of suspicion under which everyone is assumed to be guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.
To have to show a passport before giving a talk is a minor irritant. For many people, as the Windrush scandal exposed, and as EU citizens in post-Brexit Britain may find, such checks can be a life-changing experience, denying them hospital treatment or welfare benefits, even leading to detention…
I’m a bit puzzled, though. The demand he quotes suggests that the college that invited him was employing him to give a talk — i.e. for a fee, and in a way that’s understandable given current legislation. But if he was just coming to give an invited talk without pay (but with travel expenses) then the demand is indeed outrageous.
Quote of the Day
”There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.”
- Norbert Wiener
Linkblog
- The Ship of State: A Conversation with Dave Eggers Good interview by Tom Lutz of Dave Eggars about his new book, The Captain and the Glory: An Entertainment. It’s a satire about Trump, if you believe such a thing is possible. And I’ve pre-ordered a copy. (It’s out on December 5.)
- The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change A fascinating, honest, thoughtful, essay on whether Carbon Capture might be a feasible (and affordable) way of mitigating climate change by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
- Is Elon Musk preparing for the failure of the state? Interesting macro-interpretation of the projects in which he has major investments. Note also that the new Tesla pickup truck is bulletproof.
Tech commentary and gender
This morning’s Observer column:
Reading the observations of these three women brought to the surface a thought that’s been lurking at the back of my mind for years. It is that the most trenchant and perceptive critiques of digital technology – and particularly of the ways in which it has been exploited by tech companies – have come from female commentators. The thought originated ages ago as a vague impression, then morphed into an intuitive correlation and eventually surfaced as a conjecture that could be examined.
So I spent a few hours going through a decade’s-worth of electronic records – reprints, notes and links. What I found is an impressive history of female commentary and a gallery of more than 20 formidable critics…