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recent bookmarks from jmOpinion | The Uber I.P.O. Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley - The New York Times2019-05-02T14:57:57+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/uber-ipo.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
jmUber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech I.P.O. since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.
]]>startups uber silicon-valley morality ethics future work techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9be30a695295/Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance2017-04-20T20:34:41+00:00
http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm
jm
We built the commercial internet by mastering techniques of persuasion and surveillance that we’ve extended to billions of people, including essentially the entire population of the Western democracies. But admitting that this tool of social control might be conducive to authoritarianism is not something we’re ready to face. After all, we're good people. We like freedom. How could we have built tools that subvert it?
As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I contend that there are structural reasons to worry about the role of the tech industry in American political life, and that we have only a brief window of time in which to fix this.
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