This is not the most pressing matter in the world. It might appear moderately consequential to no one except to the folks directly involved. And yet it is. I’m speaking of a cultural misdeed, an offense that threatens to venture into the realm of a crime. I’m speaking of the glowing reception to the recently…
Like most of the world that cares about these things, I haven’t thought much of Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion dollar effort to build a Metaverse. It’s a potentially infinite universe (and thus a potentially infinite ad space) most have shown no interest in visiting. Its most striking design feature seems to lurk in Zuckerberg’s blind spot,…
If you think of technology as the materialized knowhow of others, then what’s the equivalent for ethics? Waiting… Yes, those are crickets you hear. Which is astounding when you consider the stakes. Consider: In the April 2017 issue of National Geographic, Linda MacDonald Glenn, a bioethicist at the California State University, Monterey Bay, gave an…
Fake news, so much in the news, is a matter of semantics, ideology, deceit, power, money, and, increasingly, technology. Tech has a role creating, disseminating, sharing, detecting, exposing, debunking, and correcting fake news. And not surprisingly the technology is getting more sophisticated. Probably most people whose technology is used to create fake news didn’t get…
We love our gadgets, apps, and Internet. We use them, they rule us. This isn’t an alternative fact, and your skepticism won’t save you. Director James Cameron, discussing the relevance of The Terminator stories, in which technology evolves to the point of logically concluding humans must die, said recently: “if Terminator was about the war between the…
Darwin's Gong Show