That’s not a typo. It was a Mad magazine cover – Mad having been the Onion or Babylon Bee of its day – and according to dpgreatlife, “Thimk” was a poke at Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who was once at NCR and later IBM. Watson’s simple mantra was “Think.”
The Atlantic recently ran a piece entitled THE RISE OF TECHNO-AUTHORITARIANISMSilicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.
In the relatively early days of Web 2, we wrote an editorial warning that the age of social was creating companies with greater populations than have most countries on the planet. In fact, we called them as nation-states, and warned back then that they could become more powerful than any government on the planet. It might have taken them 10+ years, but it seems at least the Atlantic seems to be catching on.Read More...
Given the present situation in the Middle East, it’s not easy to write about something like, say, the FEMA emergency broadcasting system test alert that we all experienced October 4, like it or not, and attention does need to be paid there – coming!
The invasion by Hamas into Israel and the attacks and wholesale murder and/or kidnappings of innocent civilians was amoral, to put it mildly. The world is gobsmacked, no matter which side you’re on, and since we opine on tech rather than politics, there is very much a lesson here for us all in tech overreach.
While LLMs such as ChatGPT are still very new and people do seem to forgive them for some of the ‘hallucinations’ qua fabricated information they may deliver, Amazon’s Echo and Alexa have been around for quite some time now and in case you missed it, Amazon Shuts Down Smart Home for a Week Over Racist Slur Claim.
Which begs the question: where does tech end and what belongs to you begin?
“If you bought a toaster, at the end of the day, you own the toaster. It’s your toaster…Alexa is not a subscription service. You buy the devices, and that’s supposed to be it,” said the Microsoft engineer who was shut out of all things in his connected home connected by Amazon-controlled devices, such as Echo and Alexa.Read More...
What is it with that name and the need to control? Or manipulate. We refer to the Mar(c)(k)s Andreessen and Zuckerberg, respectively.
Although the spellings may be different to deceive the clueless.
Marc Andreessen, who a while back explained Why Software Is Eating the World, is now instructing us on Why AI Will Save The World. Mind you, in his earlier a16Z blog post, while he was right about how technology would take over, he didn’t bother to mention what we’d have to surrender for the privilege: our privacy and all our personal information.Read More...
From what we’ve witnessed about the tech space to date, tech is all about invention and reinvention.
Example: it’s a communications tool. How long has the telephone been around, meaning landlines? Instead of calling, we ping or email or Zoom. Nothing new, really: only the words and devices and delivery mechanisms have changed to deceive the clueless.
Tech is also about glorification and vilification – and sometimes both, in the same person. Everyone’s (former) hero Elon Musk bought Twitter and the tech media banded against him – no matter that Twitter had been a platform for propaganda and surveillance under Jack Dorsey’s tenure. Yet, no matter what, Dorsey, for some reason, can seemingly do no wrong.Read More...
Bill Gates was a college dropout. Steve Jobs quit after one semester. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t finish, either. So it was no wonder that, when the tech sector rose to prominence, kids believed that dropping out of college and starting a company was de rigueur for success in life. And to be wealthy and lionized.
The Age of Social loved tech ‘luminaries’ such as Zuck and Jack Dorsey and how convenient that their genius could be amplified on the very platforms they created. Tech founders were the rockstars of the computer age.
We know things move faster in the online world, but how did these guys get so rich and powerful in so short an amount of time?Read More...
When we first got wind of the Generative AI, knowing that it was scraping the internet and well aware of the rampant censorship that has been and is being practiced by the social networks, all of whom have had a stranglehold on the conversation for quite some time, including the pre-Musk Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, we knew this would be a problem. And lest we forget, the programs tend to be written by programmers who have a certain bias, or whose C-Level has a certain bias, and in case you missed it: The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable. The AIs will always have human biases, because it’s humans who are creating it.
Generative AI isn’t the only thing that’s faking it. Getting more sophisticated and no doubt soon to hit that same tipping point are the Deepfakes, both visual and audio. For how many years has Big Tech been capturing your face and voice? “With no barriers to creating AI-synthesized text, audio and video, the potential for misuse in identity theft, financial fraud and tarnish reputations has sparked global alarm,” the Japan Times reported.Read More...
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
Those of us who work in technology – which is most of us here – can’t help but glom onto or at least test the shiny new thing that comes along. It’s in our DNA. The problem is that tech tends to jump in feet first without realizing the possible consequences, dystopian side, or even fully examining the product.
Apologies if we sound a bit repetitive here, but read on. We do have a point to make, that no one else seems to be considering.
