Kara Swisher: Keeping tech honest

Kara Swisher: Keeping tech honest

This reminded me of our Singularity meeting. Talking about platforms like Facebook she wonders why they didn’t build social responsibility into it. This is partly because the techies don’t understand much outside of their specialty, like the humanities (see 4c), thereby not having a sense of how their tech impacts the broader world. They assume that somehow the tech will magically solve these broader problems, but Facebook has proven beyond doubt that they do not, instead exacerbating them. And ultimately it seems to boil down to an adolescent boy’s emotional quotient (EQ).

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Mark H

If we end up with engineered inorganic or hybrid internally integrated (cyborg) systems that can significantly mitigate the negative aspects of our evolved biases and tendencies, might we be able to boost our center of gravity up Maslow’s hierarchy? The first path (engineered external systems) would leave us as legacy (evolved) animals but turn over governance to AIs that would keep our social dominance drives in check. The second path (what Hariri called ‘technohumanism’) would internalize that governance through neuroprostheses.

Mark H

😉 I agree there are clearly viable alternatives to malignant capitalism. As ever, we crash on the reef of human nature. Perpetual growth mindset hosts the parasite of perpetually increasing power/wealth inequality (and its negative byproducts) not because ongoing growth is inherently bad (intelligence has a whole universe to expand into) but because our evolved nature ever pulls us back into the old perceptions and behaviors. This won’t change until we change ourselves. Unamended humans are never going to choose a sustainable, more egalitarian global way of being. Was it Einstein who said you can’t solve problems with the same… Read more »

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