“Will the imminent “rise of the robots” threaten all future human employment? The most thoughtful discussion of that question can be found in MIT economist David H. Autor’s 2015 paper, “Why Are There Still so Many Jobs?”, which considers the problem in the context of Polanyi’s Paradox. Given that “we can know more than we can tell,” the twentieth-century philosopher Michael Polanyi observed, we shouldn’t assume that technology can replicate the function of human knowledge itself. Just because a computer can know everything there is to know about a car doesn’t mean it can drive it.

This distinction between tacit knowledge and information bears directly on the question of what humans will be doing to produce economic value in the future. Historically, the tasks that humans have performed have fallen into ten broad categories. The first, and most basic, is using one’s body to move physical objects, which is followed by using one’s eyes and fingers to create discrete material goods. The third category involves feeding materials into machine-driven production processes – that is, serving as a human robot – which is followed by actually guiding the operations of a machine (acting as a human microprocessor).”

Robo-Apocalypse? Not in Your Lifetime | by J. Bradford DeLong
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rise-of-robots-social-work-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-05
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“The idea is to allow people to use their thoughts to navigate intuitively through augmented reality—the neuro-driven version of the world recently described by Kevin Kelly in these pages. No typing, no speaking, even, to distract you or slow you down as you interact with digital additions to the landscape: driving instructions superimposed over the freeway, short biographies floating next to attendees of a conference, 3-D models of furniture you can move around your apartment.

The Harvard audience was a little taken aback by the conversation’s turn, and Zittrain made a law-professor joke about the constitutional right to remain silent in light of a technology that allows eavesdropping on thoughts. “Fifth amendment implications are staggering,” he said to laughter. Even this gentle pushback was met with the tried-and-true defense of big tech companies when criticized for trampling users’ privacy—users’ consent. “Presumably,” Zuckerberg said, “this would be something that someone would choose to use as a product.”

In short, he would not be diverted from his self-assigned mission to connect the people of the world for fun and profit. Not by the dystopian image of brain-probing police officers. Not by an extended apology tour. “I don’t know how we got onto that,” he said jovially. “But I think a little bit on future tech and research is interesting, too.””

Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine
https://www.wired.com/story/zuckerberg-wants-facebook-to-build-mind-reading-machine/
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“Yet, with centuries of technology advancement and the almost exponential increase of computing resources, data, knowledge, and capabilities, we still have not yet achieved the vision of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) -- machines that can be an equal counterpart of human ability. We’re not even close. We have devices we can talk to that don’t understand what we’re saying. We have cars that will happily drive straight into a wall if that’s what your GPS instructs it to do. Machines are detecting images but not understanding what they are. And we have amazing machines that can beat world champions at chess and Go and multiplayer games, but can’t answer a question as basic as “how long should I cook a 14 pound turkey?” We’ve mastered computing. We’ve wrangled big data. We’re figuring out learning. We have no idea how to achieve general intelligence.”

Artificial Intelligence Is Not A Technology
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/11/01/artificial-intelligence-is-not-a-technology/?utm_campaign=f93d7b1204-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_11_10_05_46&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Cognitive%2BRoundUp&utm_term=0_8baf59472a-f93d7b1204-98985207
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“The key driver should not only be technological progress, but human progress. This is a huge issue. I do believe that Europe is a place where we are able to assert collective preferences and articulate them with universal values. I mean, Europe is the place where the DNA of democracy was shaped, and therefore I think Europe has to get to grips with what could become a big challenge for democracies.”

Emmanuel Macron Talks to WIRED About France's AI Strategy
https://www.wired.com/story/emmanuel-macron-talks-to-wired-about-frances-ai-strategy/
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“Known by the anodyne name “social credit,” this system is designed to reach into every corner of existence both online and off. It monitors each individual’s consumer behavior, conduct on social networks, and real-world infractions like speeding tickets or quarrels with neighbors. Then it integrates them into a single, algorithmically determined “sincerity” score. Every Chinese citizen receives a literal, numeric index of their trustworthiness and virtue, and this index unlocks, well, everything. In principle, anyway, this one number will determine the opportunities citizens are offered, the freedoms they enjoy, and the privileges they are granted.”

China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/chinas-dangerous-dream-of-urban-control/553097/
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“Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we’re all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you’re driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out.”

For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html
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“The report found that while automation is requiring workers to maintain technical fluency across roles, the rise of machine-led tasks makes it necessary for them to do what machines can’t, which is to be adaptable, critical thinkers who can lead and communicate well.”

Forget learning to code, bosses value collaboration and communication
https://www.fastcompany.com/40536361/soft-skills-take-the-top-spot-in-employers-ranking-for-developing-talent
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“These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst.”

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610298/tech-companies-should-stop-pretending-ai-wont-destroy-jobs/
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“These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst.”

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610298/tech-companies-should-stop-pretending-ai-wont-destroy-jobs/
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“These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst.”

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610298/tech-companies-should-stop-pretending-ai-wont-destroy-jobs/
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“I’ve warned for a long time that organizations — whether societies or corporations or political parties — must focus, in this troubled, fractured age, on mattering to people: really improving and transforming their lives. The “backlash” tech faces now is what happens when you don’t. More accurately put, people and societies are losing trust in tech, catastrophically. Why is that?”

The Revolt Against Silicon Valley’s Failed Dream – Eudaimonia and Co
https://eand.co/the-revolt-against-silicon-valleys-failed-dream-1bf94546a9e2
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“In the world of the future, automated perfection is going to be common. Machines will bake perfect cakes, perfectly schedule appointments and keep an eye on your house. What is going to be scarce is human imperfection.”

There Is One Thing Computers Will Never Beat Us At – NewCo Shift
https://shift.newco.co/there-is-one-thing-that-computers-will-never-beat-us-at-f66af30565f0
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““AI is the new electricity,” said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and an adjunct Stanford professor who founded the Google Brain Deep Learning Project, in a keynote speech at the AI Frontiers conference that was held this past weekend in Silicon Valley. “About 100 years ago, electricity transformed every major industry. AI has advanced to the point where it has the power to transform” every major sector in coming years. And even though there’s a perception that AI was a fairly new development, it has actually been around for decades, he said. But it is taking off now because of the ability to scale data and computation.”

Why AI Is the ‘New Electricity’ - Knowledge@Wharton
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ai-new-electricity/
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“Kurt Vonnegut said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” This seems especially true now we have reached a new stage of marketing where we are not just consumers, but also the thing consumed. If you have friends you only ever talk to on Facebook, your entire relationship with them is framed by commerce. When we willingly choose to become unpaid content providers, we commercialise ourselves. And we are encouraged to be obsessed with numbers (of followers, messages, comments, retweets, favourites), as if operating in a kind of friend economy, an emotional stock market where the stock is ourselves and where we are encouraged to weigh our worth against others.”

I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong | Matt Haig
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/06/social-media-good-evidence-platforms-insecurities-health
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“Kurt Vonnegut said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” This seems especially true now we have reached a new stage of marketing where we are not just consumers, but also the thing consumed. If you have friends you only ever talk to on Facebook, your entire relationship with them is framed by commerce. When we willingly choose to become unpaid content providers, we commercialise ourselves. And we are encouraged to be obsessed with numbers (of followers, messages, comments, retweets, favourites), as if operating in a kind of friend economy, an emotional stock market where the stock is ourselves and where we are encouraged to weigh our worth against others.”

I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong | Matt Haig
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/06/social-media-good-evidence-platforms-insecurities-health
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“Technology is marvellous, but it has had little or nothing to do with the best things about the world. And it will play a minor role in casting out humanity’s worst demons: poverty, ignorance and madness. What do I mean by the best things? The outlawing of racism; rights for disabled people; emancipation for women. The primacy of reason; the dwindling of superstition. Democracy, social security, animal rights, greater life expectancy and, yes, capitalism.

We are better at judgment than any machine we will be able to make for a very long time to come. Technology is only the agent of our desires

Marc Demarest”

Technology will not save the world — we will
https://www.ft.com/content/416a773e-8e31-11e7-9580-c651950d3672
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"The people at Facebook and Google believe that giving consumers more of what they want and like is worthy of praise, not criticism. What they fail to recognize is that their products are not making consumers happier or more successful. Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google — most importantly through its YouTube subsidiary — produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term. Users fail to recognize the warning signs of addiction until it is too late. There are only 24 hours in a day, and technology companies are making a play for all them. The CEO of Netflix recently noted that his company’s primary competitor is sleep.  How does this work? A 2013 study found that average consumers check their smartphones 150 times a day. And that number has probably grown. People spend 50 minutes a day on Facebook. Other social apps such as Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter combine to take up still more time. Those companies maintain a profile on every user, which grows every time you like, share, search, shop or post a photo. Google also is analyzing credit card records of millions of people. As a result, the big Internet companies know more about you than you know about yourself, which gives them huge power to influence you, to persuade you to do things that serve their economic interests. Facebook, Google and others compete for each consumer’s attention, reinforcing biases and reducing the diversity of ideas to which each is exposed. The degree of harm grows over time."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/08/my-google-and-facebook-investments-made-fortune-but-now-they-menace/543755001/

Sent from Pocket 

“Picture this: It’s evening and, after a long day at the office, you’re finally home. You’re cutting some avocados as you prepare dinner when your voice assistant pipes up and reads you an important email that just came in. Without breaking your chopping stride, you dictate a reply—perfecting your guacamole while preserving your relationship with your boss.

This might sound like heaven to you—or, just as likely, hell. Either way, it’s about to be our reality.

When Amazon introduced Alexa, the tech industry quickly anointed voice as the next big thing. Sure, she was mostly reciting the weather and answering lewd questions from nine-year-old boys, but the future held much more. The rise of voice devices will rewrite the digital playbook in unpredictable ways—including how, when, and whether we have the ability to say, “Enough!” In a time when digital detoxing, unplugging, and disconnecting are widely discussed and even yearned for, voice could turn into the platform you can’t turn off.

As we currently experience them, voice assistants are passive devices. We call their names when we have a question, want to hear some music, or need to set a timer. Otherwise, they sit idle. Having Alexa operate the light switch for you, for example, isn’t a source of psychological stress. But it’s when these assistants begin actively demanding our time and attention that, some experts say, we’ll have a problem on our hands.”

Why Voice Assistants Will Give You a Headache | Backchannel
https://www.wired.com/story/why-voice-assistants-will-give-you-a-headache/
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“People use laws, social norms and international agreements to reap the benefits of technology while minimizing undesirable things like environmental damage. In aiming to find such rules of behavior, we often take inspiration from what game theorists call a Nash equilibrium, named after the mathematician and economist John Nash. In game theory, a Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies that, once discovered by a set of players, provides a stable fixed point at which no one has an incentive to depart from their current strategy.

To reach such an equilibrium, the players need to understand the consequences of their own and others' potential actions. During the Cold War, for example, peace among nuclear powers depended on the understanding the any attack would ensure everyone's destruction. Similarly, from local regulations to international law, negotiations can be seen as a gradual exploration of all possible moves to find a stable framework of rules acceptable to everyone, and giving no one an incentive to cheat – because doing so would leave them worse off.

But what if technology becomes so complex and starts evolving so rapidly that humans can’t imagine the consequences of some new action? This is the question that a pair of scientists -- Dimitri Kusnezov of the National Nuclear Security Administration and Wendell Jones, recently retired from Sandia National Labs -- explore in a recent paper. Their unsettling conclusion: The concept of strategic equilibrium as an organizing principle may be nearly obsolete.”

How Technology Might Get Out of Control
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-15/how-technology-might-get-out-of-control
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“As business leaders, we must think beyond the fiscal bottom line and technological advances in products and services and ask ourselves, how will IoT affect the communities we operate in and whatwill our role be in readying society and the workforce for this digital phenomenon that is rapidly proliferating? Technology itself has no ethics. It is only when people apply purpose and innovative thinking beyond revenue and profit that we will be able to reap collective benefits and security of the digital world.

We explored this topic in depth at the recent IoT World Forum in London, where renowned futurist Gerd Leonhard provided us a stunning window into the ethics of IoT and the critical role of human ingenuity in designing and shepherding its outcomes. (Watch the replay of Gerd’s keynote, moderated by Cisco’s CMO, Karen Walker: “Beyond Business: A Holistic View of the Societal and Human Impact of IoT.”)

As the IoT World Forum team put its agenda together for an influential community of C-suite executives in London, there was a realization that we needed to address this topic, as provocative (and sobering) as it might be. We recognized that we had to acknowledge the “elephant in the room”: that we are in unchartered territory, as we enter into this new era of exponential change together. When we think about what the implications are of a rapid surge in IoT innovation, we must all collectively consider the potential effects on the geopolitical and global economic landscape (in both advanced and developing nations); on global challenges such as wealth inequality, aging populations, healthcare, and the environment; and on the global workforce. Of course, no one has all the answers, but we must be bold in exploring these issues as a global business community. I will explore this in more depth in my next blog, but I will say that we know we need a global unified approach to succeed. No one can go it alone, and a “head in the sand” mentality is not an option.”

Human ingenuity will be the genesis for IoT prosperity
http://www.cio.com/article/3212868/digital-transformation/human-ingenuity-and-iot-prosperity.html
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“What is the singularity?

In maths/physics, the singularity is the point at which a function takes an infinite value because it’s incomprehensibly large.
The technological singularity, as it called, is the moment when artificial intelligence takes off into ‘artificial superintelligence’ and becomes exponentially more intelligent more quickly.

As self-improvement becomes more efficient, it would get quicker and quicker at improvement until the machine became infinitely more intelligent infinitely quickly.”

End of humanity as we know it's ‘coming in 2045’ and Google is preparing for it
http://metro.co.uk/2017/07/27/the-end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it-is-coming-in-2045-and-big-companies-are-working-towards-it-6807683/
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“For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.”

When Will the Planet Be Too Hot For Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
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“But data is never “just” data, and to assert otherwise is to lend inherently political and interested decisions an unmerited gloss of scientific objectivity. The truth is that data is easily skewed, depending on how it is collected. Different values for air pollution in a given location can be produced by varying the height at which a sensor is mounted by a few metres. Perceptions of risk in a neighbourhood can be transformed by slightly altering the taxonomy used to classify reported crimes. And anyone who has ever worked in opinion polling knows how sensitive the results are to the precise wording of a survey.”

Rise of the machines: who is the ‘internet of things’ good for?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/internet-of-things-smart-home-smart-city
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“It worries me that so many of the builders of technology today are people who haven’t spent time thinking about these larger questions.” Ruefully—and with some embarrassment at my younger self’s condescending attitude toward the humanities—I now wish that I had strived for a proper liberal arts education. That I’d learned how to think critically about the world we live in and how to engage with it. That I’d absorbed lessons about how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural inequality, and injustice. That I’d had opportunities to debate my peers and develop informed opinions on philosophy and morality. And even more than all of that, I wish I’d even realized that these were worthwhile thoughts to fill my mind with—that all of my engineering work would be contextualized by such subjects.”

A leading Silicon Valley engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education
https://qz.com/1016900/tracy-chou-leading-silicon-valley-engineer-explains-why-every-tech-worker-needs-a-humanities-education/
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“In other words, society’s push toward humanizing AI could have the unintended consequence of the dehumanization of actual humans.”

Is it unethical to design robots to resemble humans?
https://qz.com/1010828/is-it-unethical-to-design-robots-to-resemble-humans/
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“Increasingly, the people and companies with the technological or scientific ability to create new products or innovations are de facto making policy decisions that affect human safety and society. But these decisions are often based on the creator’s intent for the product, and they don't always take into account its potential risks and unforeseen uses. What if gene-editing is diverted for terrorist ends? What if human-pig chimeras mate? What if citizens prefer to see birds rather than flying cars when they look out a window? (Apparently, this is a real risk. Uber plans to offer flight-hailing apps by 2020.) What if Echo Look leads to mental health issues for teenagers? Who bears responsibility for the consequences?”

Ethical Innovation Means Giving Consumers a Say | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/innovation-ethically/
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“What it means to be human is effectively changing," says "Humans" writer Sam Vincent. "It's been changing for hundreds and thousands of years, but this is the first time that we can have a hand in our own evolution. There seems to be little doubt that we are going to join the machines; in some ways we already are cyborgs — we have outsourced so many things to a piece of technology that's always in our hands or pocket or bag."”

'Westworld,' 'Black Mirror' and other tech-driven shows delve into what it means to be human
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-st-technology-on-tv-20170525-story.html
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