Scesci 
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RE: Noteworthy articles I've read lately
the "i want" article is actually pretty scary , we have dilma roussef as president here, i know how this reality works
the google robotics has a different tone of worry, cybernetic authoritarism is not fully yet exposed, low testosterone sillicon valley mogul's will soon replace the old oil,banker and diamonds elites
singularity is all about human disposability, a cybernetic noah's ark reaching immortality through machines where they constatly upload themselves, based on heavy user surveillance, hence they need the big data for that
consciousness and individuality for these people is just a metaphysical concept, something to surpass as a species ( cultural marxism anyone?)
People, are the flies in Moore's Law's ointment.
they want to remove authoral rights to force the creative commons, really believing that machines will do a better job writing books, producing content,without humans involved, institutionalizing the digital collective, further repressing individuality (this is why we dont have great art, great music, the collective didn't invent the theory of relativity, beethoven ninth simphony...)
these are the guys behind all the global recent riots like we had in Brazil june last year, its the same profile, the same lack of guidance, anonymous,black blocks, nothings get's solved, nonsense demands
the intrisical and implicit objetive is to drain the politic power of all nations and depositing the control to the internet, a brand new type of capitalist and marketed authoritarism
the ultra liberals from sillicon valley necessarily need to associate with the extreme left to reach their goals , the data these bastards collect freely is already being sold to unknown bidders without our knowledge(remember wikileaks and snowden) two polarizing forces working in sinergy
http://www.newgeography.com/content/0042...con-valley
Quote:One top venture capitalist, Thomas Perkins was so upset over what he sees as scapegoating of the rich that he compared their condition to Jews in Nazi Germany. His directness upset some, but may have expressed more of what is really thought by smoother, younger, more PC-conscious executives.
This is more than simply the usual case of rich people being out of touch. These are not media constructs like Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton but very powerful, incredibly wealthy people who increasingly are a dominant force in California and national politics. Yet, their political positions often have a “let them eat cake” character. And to be sure, some new oligarchs lean right, mostly on the libertarian side, but these are a distinct minority. The notion of some in the Republican Party who see the Valleyites as saviors is nothing short of delusional.
For the most part, executive and workers at firms such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter are strong proponents of every politically correct idea from climate change legislation to opposing the expansion of suburbia and favoring gay marriage. Yet they are also becoming the wealthiest entities in the nation; besides GE, a classic conglomerate, the largest cash hoards now belong to Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Google, all of which sometimes have more dollars on hand than the U.S. government. Seven of the eight biggest individual winners from stock gains in 2013 were tech entrepreneurs. They were led by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who added $12 billion to his paper wealth; Mark Zuckerberg, who raked in an additional $11.9 billion; and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who each gained roughly $9 billion.
Given their phenomenal wealth, one observer compared Silicon Valley politics to those of a mall outlet selling Che Guevara t-shirts. They no doubt nod their heads when President Obama speaks of economic inequality, but when it comes to doing something about it, their general response is: Nevermind.
However they color themselves politically, the oligarchs live above and apart from the rest of society – and, like Draper, want to keep it that way. Their desire to separate from the hoi polloi is natural and stems, in part, from their notion of being a class apart from mere mortals. “We live in a bubble, and I don't mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt boasted to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. “And what a world it is. Companies can't hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn't really something that comes up in a daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”
Certainly, politically correct gestures, like support for climate change legislation, don't change this calculus. Google executives, for example, urge the middle class and working class to pay for subsidized, expensive energy – which they also invest in – but maintain their own fleet of private planes.
The distinct sets of rules for oligarchs and everyone else extends even to the most personal issues. Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, banned telecommuting options for employees – particularly critical for those unable to house their families anywhere close to Yahoo's ultrapricey Sunnyvale home town. Yet, Mayer, pregnant at the time, saw no contradiction in building a nursery in her office.
Nor can it be said that the Valley elite gives at the office. Rather than “share the pain,” tech firms are notorious for not paying much in the way of taxes, including taxes on their properties. Facebook, for example, paid no taxes in 2012, despite making a profit of over $1 billion. Apple, which the New York Times recently described as “a pioneer in tactics to avoid taxes,” has kept much of its cash hoard as part of its basic corporate strategy.
Quote:Remarkably some people, on both the right and left, believe that the Valley's tech community should reform the nation, and recreate the government in their image. True, the likes of Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell do not inspire much confidence, but a society run by the tech lords would be very cold, and highly stratified.
Silicon Valley's problem, as author Jaron Lanier has put it, “is people.” Ultimately, human beings will resent being transformed into little more than digits in a Google algorithm that is then sold to advertisers. Most Americans reject being looked down on by a group that, given accidents of birth, access to money, social networks or even high intelligence, wishes not to share a state, or even a nation, with those who have less. That these attitudes now emanate from people who consider themselves both progressive and uniquely enlightened is not only hypocritical, but almost qualifies as obscene.
http://www.newstatesman.com/scitech/2011...y-computer
Quote:In retrospect, I cringe to think how naive and messianic the tech scene became amid all the post-1960s idealism. The two poles of San Francisco Bay Area 1960s culture - psychedelic hippies and leftist revolutionaries - became the poles of early computer culture.
In 1974, the philosopher Ted Nelson, the first person to propose and describe the programming of something like the web, published a large-format book composed of montages of nearly indecipherable small-print snippets flung in all directions, called Computer Lib/Dream Machines. If you turned the book one way, it was what Che Guevara would have been reading in the jungle if he had been a computer nerd. Flip it upside down, and you had a hippie-wow book with visions of crazy, far-out computation.
humans are already becoming machines, just see how people are ruled by social media, just reproducing, oversharing ,not producing any king of content, controlling our behavior with psychological rewards like a skinner box (we dont see none of the money they make on our use) while machines are becoming more human and smarter
Jaron Lanier wrote about this in two books
You're not a gadget
Quote:In his book You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Lanier criticizes what he perceives as the hive mind of Web 2.0 (wisdom of the crowd) and describes the open source and open content expropriation of intellectual production as a form of "Digital Maoism".[17] Lanier argues that Web 2.0 developments have retarded progress and innovation and glorified the collective at the expense of the individual. He criticizes Wikipedia and Linux as examples of this problem; Wikipedia for what he sees as: its "mob rule" by anonymous editors, the weakness of its non-scientific content, and its bullying of experts. Lanier also argues that there are limitations to certain aspects of the open source and content movement in that they lack the ability to create anything truly new and innovative. For example, Lanier argues that the open source movement didn't create the iPhone. In another example, Lanier claims that Web 2.0 makes search engines lazy, destroys the potential of innovative websites like Thinkquest, and hampers the communication of ideas like mathematics to a wider audience. Lanier further argues that the open source approach has destroyed opportunities for the middle class to finance content creation, and results in the concentration of wealth in a few individuals—"the lords of the clouds"—people who, more by virtue of luck rather than true innovation, manage to insert themselves as content concentrators at strategic times and locations in the cloud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F
Quote:in Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier posits that the middle class is increasingly disenfranchised from online economies. By convincing users to give away valuable information about themselves in exchange for free services, firms can accrue large amounts of data at virtually no cost. Lanier calls these firms “Siren Servers,” alluding to the Sirens of Ulysses. Instead of paying each individual for their contribution to the data pool, the Siren Servers concentrate wealth in the hands of the few who control the data centers. For example, he points to Google’s translation algorithm, which amalgamates previous translations uploaded by people online, giving the user its best guess. The people behind the source translations receive no payment for their work, while Google profits from increased ad visibility as a powerful Siren Server.
related articles
http://business.time.com/2013/05/07/how-...yre-at-it/
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_la...dle_class/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation...40/?no-ist
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