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| Science & Technology |
| "Machines Designed to Change Humans" |
| 2019-08-15 |
| [Medium.com] The Tech Industry’s War on Kids Nestled in an unremarkable building on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, is the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps ‐ including smartphones, social media, and video games ‐ are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: "Machines designed to change humans." Fogg speaks openly of the ability to use smartphones and other digital devices to change our ideas and actions: "We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously." Called "the millionaire maker," Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, "My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford... For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. |
| Posted by:Phaick Uneretle6310 |
| #2 I'm a broken record on this. See David Gelernter. Kids need to learn fundamentals, reading, writing, mathematics. I'm sure someone, somewhere has written a software package designed to provide drills in the fundamentals of reasoning. I'm even more sure you will not find it in general use in schools at the level where kids should be learning this. I also know teachers have long given up on seeing stuff lifted verbatim from wikipedia in kids cut and paste essays. At least the kids doing that have learned how to cut and paste. The tech industry is all about telling kids what to think. How to think is criminal knowledge in the brave new world they want. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2019-08-15 09:48 |
| #1 Abuse of technology, for frivolous shit. Creates more idiots and psychos than decadence literature did. I would rather that machines and tech elevated humanity. Tech could have made possible the democratization of Justice. A secured voting system where the Judge is a remote server and the entire population reads the arguments, peruses the evidence online and votes on a very limited choice of verdicts. Add in an AI that just needs weighted data, the skew pushing to lean toward a ruling, then the AI evaluates the best possible outcome. But the powers of this world will not go for such a thing, because the coercive power of every state is enshrined in a black-robed arbiter who may be senile for all you can do about it. The day a consensus powered Robo-Judge walks into courtrooms, the reign of criminality is over. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2019-08-15 02:53 |