The Agenda

 

 https://theagendafilm.com/ Watch Free

The Agenda

'The Agenda: Their Vision | Your Future' is a feature-length independent documentary produced by Mark Sharman; former UK broadcasting executive at ITV and Sky (formerly BSkyB).

In fiction and fact, there have always been people and organisations with ambitions to control the world. And now the oligarchs who pull the strings of finance and power finally have the tools to achieve their global objectives; omnipresent surveillance, artificial intelligence, digital currency and ultimately digital identities. The potential for social control of our lives and minds is alarmingly real.

The plan has been decades in the making and has seen infiltration of Governments, local councils, big business, civil society, the media and, crucially, education. A ceaseless push for a new reality, echoing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or George Orwell’s 1984.

The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future examines the digital prison which awaits us if we do not push back right now. How your food, energy, money, travel and even your access to the internet could be limited and controlled; how financial power is strangling democracy and how global institutions like the World Health Organisation are commandeered to champion ideological and fiscal objectives.

Read more

Army Developing AI Missiles That Identify Their Own Targets

Technocracy News

Technocrats at defense contractors have developed a hybrid targeting system using drones and AI that find their own targets, then coordinate with artillery-launch missiles for destruction.

There has never been a weapon created in the history of mankind that was not used in battle.
 ⁃ TN Editor

The U.S. Army is working on a new artillery shell capable of locating enemy targets, including moving tanks and armored vehicles. The shell, called Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munition (C-DAEM), is designed to replace older weapons that leave behind unexploded cluster bomblets on the battlefield that might pose a threat to civilians. The shell is designed to hit targets even in situations where GPS is jammed and friendly forces are not entirely sure where the enemy is.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Army fielded dual purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) artillery rounds. DPICM was basically the concept of cluster bombs applied to artillery, with a single shell packing dozens of tennis ball-sized grenades or bomblets. DPICM shells were designed to eject the bomblets over the battlefield, dispersing them over a wide area. The bomblets were useful unprotected infantry troops and could knock out a tank or armored vehicle’s treads, weapons, or sensors, disabling it.

DPICM made artillery more lethal than ever, but there was a cost nobody foresaw: unexploded dud bomblets often littered battlefields, becoming a danger to civilians long after the war was over. An international movement to ban cluster bombs and artillery came about, and though the U.S. isn’t a signatory it has pledged not to use munitions with a dud rate greater than one percent. Dud rates for such weapons often reach five percent or more.

Read more

Brookings: Artificial Intelligence In America’s Digital City

This report smacks of Technocracy, where cities are little more than concentrated and convenient labor camps for big business. It contends that “technology is essential to make cities work.” ⁃ TN Editor

Technocracy News

Cities are an engine for human prosperity. By putting people and businesses in close proximity, cities serve as the vital hubs to exchange goods, services, and even ideas. Each year, more and more people move to cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas to take advantage of the opportunities available in these denser spaces.

Technology is essential to make cities work. While putting people in close proximity has certain advantages, there are also costs associated with fitting so many people and related activities into the same place. Whether it’s multistory buildings, aqueducts and water pipes, or lattice-like road networks, cities inspire people to develop new technologies that respond to the urban challenges of their day.

Today, we can see the responses made possible by the advances of the second industrial revolution, namely steel and electricity. Multistory buildings and skyscrapers responded to our demand for proximity to do business in the same locations. Electrified and subterranean railways offered faster travel for more people in tight, urban quarters. The elevator, escalator, and advanced construction equipment allowed our buildings to grow taller and our subways to burrow deeper. Electric lighting turned our cities, suburbs, and even small towns into 24-hour activity centers. Air conditioning greatly improved livability in warmer locations, unlocking a population boom. Radios and television extended how far we can communicate and the fidelity of the messages we sent.

We are now in the midst of a new industrial era: the digital age. And like the industrial revolutions to precede it, the digital age doesn’t represent a single set of new products. Instead, the digital age represents an entirely new platform on top of which many everyday activities operate. Making all this possible are rapid advances in the power, portability, and price of computing and the emergence of reliable, high-volume digital telecommunications.

 Like every form of technology to proceed it, society must be intentional with the exact challenges we want AI to solve and be considerate of the social groups and industries who stand to benefit from the applications we deliver.

How AI will function in the built environment certainly fits into that category—and for good reason. Even though AI is still in its infant stages, we already encounter it on a daily basis. When your video conference shifts the microphone to pick up the speaker’s voice, when your smartphone automatically reroutes you around traffic, when your thermostat automatically lowers the air conditioning on a cool day—that’s all AI in action.

Read more

Jeffrey Epstein Showcases The Mind Of A Technocrat

Technocracy News

"Epstein may represent the end result of science for science’ sake but without morality and ethics. His scientistic worldview is proven to be thoroughly bankrupt, and is but a signpost to the collapse of western civilization." 

⁃ TN Editor

With the slew of reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s recent arrest on federal charges for sex trafficking of minors, many sordid details of the money manager’s wrongdoings have been revealed. However, few reports have focused on the fact that Epstein has funded some of the most famous scientists in the world. If we look closely at his role as a science philanthropist, Epstein’s more pernicious political significance becomes clear and gives us all reason to reflect on the values of the Western civilization in crisis that his worldview represents.

Epstein’s Science Philanthropy Empire

The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation was established in 2000 with the stated mission of “supporting innovation in science and education.” In 2003, the Foundation pledged a $30 million donation to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, where Epstein had already been a “long-time, low-profile” donor. This graduate department studies the “fundamental mathematical principles that guide evolution” and, according to Epstein’s website, also investigates topics such as “population structure, prelife, eusociality, [and] evolutionary economics.”

Despite pressure to return the gift after Epstein’s initial charges for soliciting sex from prostitutes in 2006, Harvard refused to do so. Former president Derek C. Bok weighed in, questioning why “Harvard should have an obligation to investigate each donor and impose detailed moral standards.” 

After orchestrating a plea deal in 2008 with the help of Harvard law professor and well-known apologistfor Israel’s war crimes, Alan Dershowitz, Epstein maintained his friendly relationship with Harvard, where he continued to sit on the board of the Harvard Society of Mind, Brain, and Behavior. As of 2014, he was also “actively involved” in the Santa Fe Institute, the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Quantum Gravity Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Besides his Ivy League connections in the United States, Epstein has recently poured money into Artificial Intelligence research abroad, namely the OpenCog research group in Hong Kong and MicroPsi Project 2 in Berlin. Forbes reported in 2013 that this AI research was targeted at the development of “radical emotional software.”

In addition to these larger projects, Epstein has funded a laundry list of the world’s most famous scientists including Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Eric Lander, Stephen Kosslyn, Martin Nowak, George Church, and Nobel laureate physicists Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek. The full extent of his donations is not known since the Foundation avoided making its financial details public despite pressure from the New York Attorney General’s Office in 2015. In addition to his much publicized interactions with politicians, Epstein has taken a personal interest in many of these scientists, prompting one leading Harvard researcher to proclaim that Epstein “changed my life.”

Indeed, New York Magazine reported in 2002 that Epstein “brings a trophy-hunter’s zeal to his collection of scientists.” He flew Hawking to his personal island for a conference with 20 more of the world’s top physicists, spoke with Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Martin Nowak, once a week on the phone and flew him around the country for lectures, and went personally to Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn’s lab to observe experiments conducted on Tibetan monks, the latter whom Epstein reportedly described as “so stupid.”

Read more

Facebook bans Natural News; Health Ranger responds with message for humanity

Mike Adams
Natural News

In response to a coordinated, heavily-funded smear campaign against Natural News and myself, the Health Ranger, Facebook has now permanently banned Natural News from posting content. The channel name that has been banned is Facebook.com/healthranger, which was our primary channel reaching over 2.5 million people.

This is on top of the permanent bans of Natural News content from Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google News, Apple and other techno-fascists that now represent the greatest threat to human freedom the world has ever seen.

The techno-fascists, including Wikipedia, have decided that no speech that questions any official narrative will be allowed on any platform. Anyone who questions the safety of toxic vaccines, 5G cell towers, geoengineering, chemotherapy or glyphosate weed killer chemicals is now maliciously attacked, smeared and de-platformed. You’re not even allowed now to talk about nutrition, anti-cancer foods or nutritional supplements without being labeled a “vitamin” website accused of pushing fake cures. (That’s right: The left-wing authoritarian tyrants are now anti-nutrition on top of everything else.)

Every website or individual who expresses any view of dissent against the corrupt scientific establishment is immediately labeled “fake news,” even as the left-wing media routinely pushed total fabrications about President Trump and anyone who supports Trump.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the tech giants and their CEOs are truly enemies of humanity.

Remember: As all this censorship is taking place, the tech giants somehow claim they aren’t censoring anyone at all. They claim to have a monopoly on “facts” or “truth” and proclaim themselves to have the King’s unique right to decide who gets to speak and who must be silenced. These criminals like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook are un-elected, subject to zero transparency and offer no mechanism for due process whereby channels who are banned might defend themselves against unfair, dishonest smears or fake news attacks run by left-wing journo-terrorism hacks.

Read more

See also:

Glenn Greenwald Rips Liberals Begging For Censorship After YouTube 'Adpocalypse'

Against Big Tech Viewpoint Discrimination 

YouTube to delete thousands of accounts after it bans supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other ‘harmful’ users

Here's A List Of Ideas & Statements YouTube Will Ban You For Expressing Under Their New 'Hate Speech Policy'

Technology Is Becoming Indistinguishable From Reality

Truthstream Media

The Weaponization of Social Media: What You're Not Being Told

themindunleashed.com

Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Snapchat. Instagram. Reddit. “Social media” as we know it today barely existed fifteen years ago. Although it provides new ways to interact with people and information from all across the planet virtually instantaneously and virtually for free, we are only now beginning to understand the depths of the problems associated with these new platforms. More and more of the original developers of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter admit they no longer use social media themselves and actively keep it away from their children, and now they are finally admitting the reason why: social media was designed specifically to take advantage of your psychological weaknesses and keep you addicted to your screen.

SEAN PARKER: If the thought process that went into building these applications—Facebook being the first of them to really understand it—that thought process was all about “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s gonna get you to contribute more content and that’s gonna get you more likes and comments. So it’s a social validation feedback loop. I mean it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. And I think that we—the inventors/creators, you know, it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin Systrom at Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously and we did it anyway.

SOURCE: Sean Parker – Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability

It should be no surprise, then, that in this world of social media addicts and smartphone zombies, the 24/7 newsfeed is taking up a greater and greater share of people’s lives. Our thoughts, our opinions, our knowledge of the world, even our mood are increasingly being influenced or even determined by what we see being posted, tweeted or vlogged. And the process by which these media shape our opinions is being carefully monitored and analyzed, not by the social media companies themselves, but by the US military.

Read more

Moral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener’s Prophetic Admonition About Technology and Ethics

Web Investigator KK.org
Maria Popova

Norbert Wiener “The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

“Intelligence supposes goodwill,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the middle of the twentieth century. In the decades since, as we have entered a new era of technology risen from our minds yet not always consonant with our values, this question of goodwill has faded dangerously from the set of considerations around artificial intelligence and the alarming cult of increasingly advanced algorithms, shiny with technical triumph but dull with moral insensibility.

In De Beauvoir’s day, long before the birth of the Internet and the golden age of algorithms, the visionary mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) addressed these questions with astounding prescience in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the ideas in which influenced the digital pioneers who shaped our present technological reality and have recently been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers eager to reinstate the neglected moral dimension into the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of technology. 

Read more

At The Frontiers Of Surveillance Capitalism

Katie Fitzpatrick
The Nation

Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365. The program coerced employees into downloading an app that would monitor their health, rewarding points for exercise and good behavior. Employees who failed to accrue 3,000 points by the end of the year would be penalized with a $25 monthly fee and increased deductibles. 

Although the program was made voluntary before the strike began (and has since been eliminated), the outrage over Go365 helped ignite the strike. As one teacher told The New York Times, “People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.”

By resisting Go365, the West Virginia teachers waged two battles at once: They fought in the trenches of state austerity and on the front lines of private digital surveillance. The app presaged many of the worrying trends that Shoshana Zuboff describes in her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She explains that Silicon Valley firms are looking to wearable technologies and other smart devices to gain an increasingly detailed view of our physical and emotional health. Go365 measured teachers’ daily steps with the help of a Fitbit; Sleep Number beds measure the hours we keep and the quality of our rest; a new company called Realeyes plans to surveil our facial expressions as we watch advertisements, interpreting our emotions in real time. 

Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor our behavior, however; they plan to shape it, too. Their influence over our actions might be indirect for now, effected through the prizes and penalties that Go365 weaponized against teachers. But by integrating these devices into our daily lives, these companies also set the stage for a future of more direct intervention. Zuboff quotes one software developer fantasizing aloud about the tech industry’s ability to push and prod us remotely: “We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we can just shut your car down…we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long.”
Drawing on thorough research as well as alarming interviews like that one, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers an urgent warning about our possible future. Zuboff discusses the technological innovations and market mechanisms that make ubiquitous surveillance increasingly likely. Although her diagnosis is chilling, her solutions are few. 

Throughout the book, she decries the abuses perpetrated by Silicon Valley companies and argues that they represent a radical break from an earlier, kinder form of capitalism. But by refusing to acknowledge the continuities between past modes of exploitation and the latest horrors of surveillance capitalism, she ultimately leads readers away from the most promising paths of resistance.

Read more

Global Government and Mass Surveillance May Be Needed to Save Humanity, Expert Says

Dagny Taggart
Activist Post
 
A prominent Oxford philosopher who is known for making terrifying predictions about humanity has a new theory about our future, and it isn’t pretty.

Over 15 years ago, Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, made the case that we are all living in a Matrix-like computer simulation run by another civilization.

Here’s a summary of that theory, explained by Vox:

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones. (source)

Will humanity eventually be destroyed by one of its own creations?

 

If you find the idea of living in a computer simulation that is run by unknown beings troubling, wait until you hear Bostrom’s latest theory.

Last Wednesday, Bostrom took the stage at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to share some of the insights from his latest work, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.”

While speaking to head of the conference, Chris Anderson, Bostrom argued that mass surveillance could be one of the only ways to save humanity – from a technology of our own creation.

His theory starts with a metaphor of humans standing in front of a giant urn filled with balls that represent ideas. There are white balls (beneficial ideas), grey balls (moderately harmful ideas), and black balls (ideas that destroy civilization). The creation of the atomic bomb, for instance, was akin to a grey ball — a dangerous idea that didn’t result in our demise.
Bostrom posits that there may be only one black ball in the urn, but, once it is selected, it cannot be put back. (Humanity would be annihilated, after all.)
According to Bostrom, the only reason that we haven’t selected a black ball yet is because we’ve been “lucky.” (source)

Read more

Africa Gets ‘Smart Housing’ While Buried In Poverty

  

The UN is pledged to “End poverty in all its forms” (SDG #1) and Africa is its poster child. Instead of providing energy, property rights and capital, they get 3-D printed housing made from waste products. ⁃ TN Editor

 

Technocracy News

Africa is urbanizing fast, as its population grows and many flocks to cities in search of jobs, education and healthcare.

Studies show that hundreds of millions more Africans will live in cities over the next three decades.

Many of these new urban Africans, however, are likely to end up in informal settlements. Already an estimated 200 million Africans live in informal settlements—often without access to energy and sanitation.

The growing class of urban poor need access to decent housing. But the challenge is that the global housing sector already emits almost a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and uses up to 40 per cent of the planet’s total resources. New approaches are clearly needed.

As the housing sector grows—and it must grow if we want an equitable world—we need to reduce its environmental impact, not raise it,” said UN Environment Acting Executive Director, Joyce Msuya. “Smart design is the only way to meet our housing needs and stay within planetary boundaries.”

Read more

New Quantum Device Can “Generate All Possible Futures”

futurism.com

A team of scientists say they’ve built a quantum computer that generates a superposition of all possible futures the computer could experience.

The research, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, describes how this quantum system could help futuristic artificial intelligence learn much faster than it can today — and it could mean quantum computers are finally becoming practical tools.

First Step

 

For now, the quantum computer built by Griffith University and Nanyang Technological University scientists can hold two superpositions of 16 different possibilities, according to the research. It also uses less memory than a classical computer would, suggesting it could outperform classical systems at certain tasks.

“It is very much reminiscent of classical computers in the 1960s,” Griffith University scientist Geoff Pryde said in a press release. “Just as few could imagine the many uses of classical computers in the 1960s, we are still very much in the dark about what quantum computers can do.”

Multitasking AI

 

Right now, artificial intelligence learns by analyzing example after example and looking for patterns. The scientists behind this research argue that their quantum superpositions could vastly improve the process.

“By interfering these superpositions with each other, we can completely avoid looking at each possible future individually,” Griffith researcher Farzad Ghafari said in the press release.

Read more

Beware Agenda 21 And Its Green New Deal: Plundering The World Under The Guise of 'Sustainable Development'

Geraldine Perry
Dissident Voice

Word to the Wise: Beware the Green New Deal!

Beware Agenda 21 and its Green New Deal!

Seemingly overnight, the Green New Deal has arrived. Given the sorry state of our environment, what possible objections could there be? In this case, plenty - and they all trace back to the Green New Deal's deeply complex and surreptitious ties to UN Agenda 21.

Those who claim that Agenda 21 amounts to little more than a right-wing rant or is somehow anti-Semitic are at best seriously misinformed. Those who buy into the carefully crafted jargon of Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, Redevelopment and the Green New Deal are similarly misinformed and need to know that the environmental movement has in fact been highjacked by the Agenda 21 plan.

First, Some Background

Journalist Thomas L. Friedman is sometimes credited with being the original source for the term "Green New Deal" because in two 2007 articles, in the New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Friedman connected FDR's "New Deal" to a new "green" economy, suggesting that this might provide an economic stimulus program that could address economic inequality and climate change at the same time. Almost prophetically, Friedman also argued in earlier writings that an "iron fist inside a velvet glove" would be needed to maintain the coming new world order.

The same year the Friedman articles came out, the Green New Deal Group was formed. By July of 2008 this group came out with its Green New Deal Report which was originally published by the New Economics Foundation. A few months later, in October of 2008, Adam Steiner, who was Executive Director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNEP), unveiled the Global Green New Deal Initiative, the objective of which was to rescue the failing global economy by creating jobs in "green" industries, "funded" of course by the big banks.

Then, following the example set by the European Greens in 2006, the United States Green Party adopted a Green New Deal platform in 2010. To its everlasting credit, the U.S. Green Party has also placed monetary reform as one of its core planks, ending the banking system's privilege of creating the nation's money (as credit or debt) and returning the monetary privilege to the government where it belongs, without which reform no other reforms are possible. Other political parties would do well to adopt this most important objective, since this is the true heart of "populism" historically. However, the vast bulk of the Green Party's Green New Deal platform bears a marked (and troubling) resemblance to the Green New Deal as set out through the United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development program.

Most recently, a twenty-nine-year-old freshman Congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has overnight managed to not only make national headlines but garner the full attention of Congress, a feat never before accomplished by one so young and so soon in office. It was her promotion of the Green New Deal that seems to have garnered her such sudden fame. But the so-called legislation she has been promoting is in reality a "draft text" that calls for a proposed addendum for House Rules: it changes the rules and creates a new process for the allocation of power, all while echoing almost verbatim United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. As a recent article in Technocracy News says, with a complete version of AOC's "bill" included: "Its scope and mandate for legislative authority amounts to a radical grant of power to Washington over Americans' lives, homes, businesses, travel, banking, and more." Dr. Naomi Wolf confirms by going over the document point by point.

The Green New Deal is in fact a part of a global sustainable development program that was officially rolled out at the "Earth Summit" held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Out of that summit came Agenda 21 Earth Summit: The United Nations Program of Action from Rio, a 354-page document that can be purchased at online book retailers or downloaded in pdf format from the UN website. 

Read more

 See also: 

 Dark Green IX: UN Agenda 21 and US Land Grab 

 Dark Green X: UN Agenda 21 and SMART Growth

Beyond Censorship: Destroying Free Thought Online

Truthstream Media

An Ancient Japanese Shrine Debuts a Buddhist Robot

Comment: It's one thing to have the yin-yang symbol now fully commoditized but to usher in a robot to entice younger generations into the philosophy of a transhumanist Buddhism would no doubt have the Buddha turning in his grave...

-------------------

The Diplomat

Kyoto, Japan’s ancient former capital, is home to temples, shrines, and imperial gardens. As the birthplace of Japanese tradition, the city attracts some 53 million tourists every year.

Recently, the famed 400-year old Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto unveiled a modern makeover. The world’s first sutra-chanting android deity, modelled after Kannon the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, was introduced to the public last week. Kannon is worshiped by thousands of temples in Japan as a deity who helps people in distress; now the country’s fascination with robotics has made its way into that worship.

Kodaiji Temple Administrator Tensho Goto wanted to spread the word of Buddhism to a younger generation losing touch with the tradition. He enlisted the help of pioneer Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, head of intelligent robotics at Osaka University, who has made a name for himself in robotic research on the world stage.

The resulting android version of Kannon, named “Mindar,” stands on a pedestal at 195 centimeters tall (6 feet, 4 inches), weighs 60 kilograms, and is made with silicon and aluminum. Like many of Ishiguro’s popular telenoid robots, Mindar takes a gender-neutral human form. The appearance is kept to a bare minimum — almost like a naked robot. But as an android embodying the Goddess of Mercy, Mindar had special features designed to evoke both feminine and masculine qualities. With an open head of exposed aluminum wires and a mechanical lower half, Mindar might not be how some would picture a robotic Kannon. However, the plain facial features give room for visitors to use their own imagination in how they’d like the deity to appear.

Read more 

See also: Technocracy

The Rise Of Totalitarian Technology

 Is there such a thing as too much technology?

Nei Howe
Forbes.com

Is technological progress bad for human autonomy? That’s the question posed by Shoshana Zuboff in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” a book that recounts the ways in which corporations and governments are using technology to influence our behavior. Zuboff is just the latest to chime in on “totalitarian technology” (or “total tech”), a term that describes devices and algorithms by which individuals forfeit their privacy and autonomy for the benefit of either themselves or some third party.

In the United States, total tech can be sorted into three different categories, or “spheres” of life: consumer services, the workplace, and government and politics.

Total tech is pervasive in the increasingly data-driven world of retail. Many shopping apps tap into your phone’s GPS to access your location, allowing retailers to send you advertisements the moment you’re walking past their storefront. Personalized pricing enables retailers to charge you the exact maximum that you would be willing to pay for a given product. Your personal data isn’t safe at home, either: Digital assistants like Amazon Alexa store your query history, meaning they know everything from your unique shopping history to your travel patterns to your music preferences.

Read more

Davos elite wants to give Amazon, Google and Facebook even more power

Nick Dearden
GlobalJusticeNow 

A group of mostly rich countries used the World Economic Forum in Davos to call for negotiations on digital trade. This is ‘next big thing’ in trade talks: trying to create global rules to govern rapidly increasing online trade and accompanying flows of data (the so-called ‘oil’ of the new economy).

The massive rise in new technologies and online communications is transforming the world economy. And of course, it’s true that new technology carries with it the power to transform many people’s lives, to help our efforts to wipe out poverty, deliver healthcare and education for all, and halt environmental destruction.

But, in the wrong hands, this technology can also do precisely the opposite. What’s being dubbed the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ at Davos is energising global corporations, as they look for new ways to harness our data, cut their costs and increasingly monopolise global trade. To create a set of rules which actually gives these big tech companies – from Facebook, Amazon and Google to new platforms like Uber and AirBnB – permanent power over these new technologies, anywhere in the world, would be a disaster.

And this capture has resulted in vast wealth. The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, is now worth well over $100 billion, a fortune which increased by $24 billion last year. While the poorest half of the worlds’ population saw their wealth fall by 11% last year, Bezos is one of the global billionaires whose wealth grew 12% last year, according to Oxfam.

So technological change, grafted onto a world experiencing staggering levels of inequality, will only accelerate that inequality. We need to take action, in the way action was taken against the robber barons in America in the early twentieth century – regulating them, taxing them (and their owners), breaking them up where necessary, and investing in public development able to challenge these behemoths.

Read more

Delivery wars: Amazon's new delivery robot vs Starship's college munchie robot

zdnet.com

For those who still doubt the future of last-mile delivery belongs to robots, this must have been a jolting week. First, Starship Technologies, a robotics firm founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, announced its robots would begin delivering food to dorm rooms at George Mason University in Maryland. Now Amazon, the company with perhaps the most to immediately gain or lose by how it responds to the competition nipping on its heels in the fast delivery game, has announced its own rolling robot.

The Amazon robot is named Scout. As my ZDNet colleague reported, six of them are being trialed in a small testbed in Washington State. Like many other delivery bot trials, Scout will be accompanied by a human chaperone. It will work Monday through Friday during daylight hours and will stick to sidewalks. It will only service Prime customers, of course, and presumably there was an opt-in campaign. 

Read more

Is Big Tech Merging With Big Brother? Kinda Looks Like It

David Samuels
Wired.com 

A FRIEND OF mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.

WHEN HE OFFERED to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.

China’s social rating system, which was announced by the ruling Communist Party in 2014, will soon be a fact of life for many more Chinese.

By 2020, if the Party’s plan holds, every footstep, keystroke, like, dislike, social media contact, and posting tracked by the state will affect one’s social rating.

Personal “creditworthiness” or “trustworthiness” points will be used to reward and punish individuals and companies by granting or denying them access to public services like health care, travel, and employment, according to a plan released last year by the municipal government of Beijing. High-scoring individuals will find themselves in a “green channel,” where they can more easily access social opportunities, while those who take actions that are disapproved of by the state will be “unable to move a step.”

Big Brother is an emerging reality in China. Yet in the West, at least, the threat of government surveillance systems being integrated with the existing corporate surveillance capacities of big-data companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon into one gigantic all-seeing eye appears to trouble very few people—even as countries like Venezuela have been quick to copy the Chinese model.

Still, it can’t happen here, right? We are iPhone owners and Amazon Prime members, not vassals of a one-party state. We are canny consumers who know that Facebook is tracking our interactions and Google is selling us stuff.

Read more

Survival of the Richest

Douglas Rushkoff
Medium

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future.

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. 

Read more