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Must-watch summary of US congress hearing on tech regulation #digitalethics (via TheVerge)
technology regulation: too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing
Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game (must read via Stretchery) – is this the end of credit cards?
“Thus the federation of trust inherent in Libra, despite the ...
27
Jun 2019
The Real Reason for Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency (must-read by Kevin Werbach, in the NYT)
“For all the controversies, Facebook’s profits remain strong and its ...
22
Jun 2019
Surveillance Capitalism and the Platform Economy is humanly and societally unsustainable, and Facebook will go down with it
Read this for context: The brilliant book by ...
14
May 2019
The best excerpts from Futurist Gerd Leonhard’s recent keynotes and interviews, on topics such as Technology and Humanity, the Megashifts and Digital Ethics
???? Please visit my Youtube channel for 500+ hours of films ...
28
Apr 2019
Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine
“The idea is to allow people to use their thoughts ...
12
Mar 2019
Yes I did #DeleteFacebook: Futurist Gerd Leonhard’s take. So would a paid-for, non-commercial platform be a better solution?
As of march 23, 2018, I am no longer active ...
24
Mar 2018
Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted (good read via Esquire)
“Meanwhile, Facebook and Google (now known as Alphabet) are together worth $1.3 trillion. You could merge the world’s top five advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu) with five major media companies (Disney, Time Warner, 2...
15
Feb 2018
Gerd Leonhard’s presentation at LaFutura in Dubai: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity
Here is my deck from LaFutura 2017 in Dubai, on ...
21
Nov 2017
Tech Giants, Once Seen as Saviors, Are Now Viewed as Threats (via NYT)
In Europe, however, the ground is already shifting. Google’s share of the search engine market there is 92 percent, according to StatCounter. But that did not stop the European Union from fining it $2.7 billion in June for putting its products above those of its rivals.
A new German law that fines social networks huge sums for not taking down hate speech went into effect this month. On Tuesday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said the government was looking carefully at the roles, responsibility and legal status of Google and Facebook, with an eye to regulating them as news publishers rather than platforms.
This war, like so many wars, is going to start in Europe, Â said Mr. Galloway, the New York University professor.
Tech Giants, Once Seen as Saviors, Are Now Viewed as Threats
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/tech-giants-threats.html
A new German law that fines social networks huge sums for not taking down hate speech went into effect this month. On Tuesday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said the government was looking carefully at the roles, responsibility and legal status of Google and Facebook, with an eye to regulating them as news publishers rather than platforms.
This war, like so many wars, is going to start in Europe, Â said Mr. Galloway, the New York University professor.
Tech Giants, Once Seen as Saviors, Are Now Viewed as Threats
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/tech-giants-threats.html
14
Oct 2017
Facebook’s war on free will – powerful Franklin Foer / TheGuardian story (made me think – a lot)
“But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait.
In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.”
Facebook’s war on free will
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will
via Instapaper
In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.”
Facebook’s war on free will
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will
via Instapaper
23
Sep 2017
Algorithms are failing Facebook. Can humanity save it? Made me think …via Quartz
“Facebook wanted to be pipes, but it’s also people
Early in the company’s history, Zuckerberg referred to Facebook as a “utility,” a piece of “information infrastructure.” In a letter to potential shareholders in 2012, he compared the social network to the printing press and the television.
But television manufacturers and printing press makers have no reason to understand the difference between a historical photo and a piece of pornography, to consider how to classify photos of breastfeeding mothers, or to debate whether an exception should be made for Donald Trump’s hate speech. They merely make the tools for distributing content.
Facebook, on the other hand, built both a content-distribution platform and a global community—”social infrastructure,” as Zuckerberg more recently described it—and its role in that community ended up being both toolmaker and governing institution. Facebook doesn’t just enable communication, but sets the boundaries and rules around it. And its influence—whether on culture, on elections, or on anything else beyond its own digital borders—means that those decisions impact us all, whether or not we use Facebook.”
Algorithms are failing Facebook. Can humanity save it?
https://qz.com/977297/facebook-live-murders-algorithms-are-failing-facebook-can-humanity-save-it/
via Instapaper
Early in the company’s history, Zuckerberg referred to Facebook as a “utility,” a piece of “information infrastructure.” In a letter to potential shareholders in 2012, he compared the social network to the printing press and the television.
But television manufacturers and printing press makers have no reason to understand the difference between a historical photo and a piece of pornography, to consider how to classify photos of breastfeeding mothers, or to debate whether an exception should be made for Donald Trump’s hate speech. They merely make the tools for distributing content.
Facebook, on the other hand, built both a content-distribution platform and a global community—”social infrastructure,” as Zuckerberg more recently described it—and its role in that community ended up being both toolmaker and governing institution. Facebook doesn’t just enable communication, but sets the boundaries and rules around it. And its influence—whether on culture, on elections, or on anything else beyond its own digital borders—means that those decisions impact us all, whether or not we use Facebook.”
Algorithms are failing Facebook. Can humanity save it?
https://qz.com/977297/facebook-live-murders-algorithms-are-failing-facebook-can-humanity-save-it/
via Instapaper
09
May 2017
Facebook’s plans to augment reality are as dystopian as they are smart (via TheVerge)
“Facebook didn’t shy away from the marketing opportunities AR provides. In fact, it embraced the idea that you could hover your viewfinder over a restaurant and be told its Yelp rating, or find messages your friends leave you in public locales by peering through the camera lens on Facebook’s app. It seems clear that for every consumer benefit AR provides, there will also be a corporate one designed to exploit our attention, extract our wants and needs, and attempt to sell us products.”
Facebook’s plans to augment reality are as dystopian as they are smart
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15375694/facebook-augmented-reality-dystopian-future-f8-2017
via Instapaper
Facebook’s plans to augment reality are as dystopian as they are smart
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/20/15375694/facebook-augmented-reality-dystopian-future-f8-2017
via Instapaper
23
Apr 2017
What Google and Facebook must do about one of their biggest problems – Vivek Wadhwa
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Social media was developed with the promise of spreading democracy, community and freedom, not ignorance, bigotry and hatred. Connecting billions of people together and allowing them to share knowledge and ideas, it could have enabled them to achieve equality and justice; to expose what is wrong and crowd-solve global problems. Instead, it has become a tool enabling technology companies to mine data to sell to marketers, politicians and special-interest groups, enabling them to spread disinformation. It has created echo chambers in which people with similar views reinforce their ignorance and bias. And the loss of control over user data has now affected not just the economic lives of Americans but also the political messages they receive on platforms such as Facebook.”
What Google and Facebook must do about one of their biggest problems - Vivek Wadhwa
https://wadhwa.com/2017/04/12/google-facebook-must-one-biggest-problems/
via Instapaper
What Google and Facebook must do about one of their biggest problems - Vivek Wadhwa
https://wadhwa.com/2017/04/12/google-facebook-must-one-biggest-problems/
via Instapaper
14
Apr 2017
Forget AT&T: What about Google and Facebook…? good read via the NYT
“Look at the numbers. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Facebook are among the 10 largest companies in the world. Alphabet alone has a market capitalization of around $550 billion. AT&T and Time Warner combined would be about $300 billion.
Alphabet has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market. AT&T has a 32 percent market share in mobile phones and 26 percent in pay TV. The combined AT&T-Time Warner will have $8 billion in cash but $171 billion of net debt, according to the research company MoffettNathanson. Compare that to Alphabet’s balance sheet, with total cash of $76 billion and total debt of about $3.94 billion.
In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley.”
Forget AT&T. The Real Monopolies Are Google and Facebook. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/opinion/forget-att-the-real-monopolies-are-google-and-facebook.html via Instapaper
Gerd Leonhard Futurist, Keynote Speaker, Author
16
Dec 2016
Our Automated Future – definitive must-read on the future of work (via The New Yorker)
“Google offers a vivid illustration of how new technologies create new opportunities. Two computer-science students at Stanford go looking for a research project, and the result, within two decades, is worth more than the G.D.P. of a country like Norway or Austria. But Google also illustrates how, in the age of automation, new wealth can be created without creating new jobs. Google employs about sixty thousand workers. General Motors, which has a tenth of the market capitalization, employs two hundred and fifteen thousand people. And this is G.M. post-Watson. In the late nineteen-seventies, the carmaker’s workforce numbered more than eight hundred thousand.”
Our Automated Future
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/our-automated-future
via Instapaper
Our Automated Future
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/our-automated-future
via Instapaper
