Tech

Coming soon to as neighborhood near you: cameras everywhere. On every traffic light, intersection, telephone pole and storefront, with tracking software that uses facial, gesture and heartbeat recognition. That identity data is combined with web search history, conversations with Alexa and Siri, Amazon purchases and Twitter. A complete individual profile, with a score measuring social reliability, can be constructed and shared with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.This might sound too dystopian to be true.

On the grainy video, the first cat trips a motion detector. A light suddenly bursts on, and anyone watching the video feed can now see the side of a house, a driveway, a white pickup truck. Behind the first cat, a second cat appears, and then a third, both of whom seem more perturbed by the light. They leap up a wall at what appears to be the back of the house, disappearing into the night while a fourth cat and then a fifth appear, following the path of the first cat, who lumbers casually away and out of view. The timestamp on the bottom right-hand corner of the video footage reads 1:33 in the morning.The cats on the video are not house cats; their long, slouching bodies are those of the American cougar, also known as the catamount, puma, or mountain lion.

It seems like it should be quite the scandal: one co-founder of Facebook chastising another publicly for a business decision that has, allegedly, had major social reverberations. In response to Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren calling out Facebook for loosening its restrictions on political advertising, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes took to Twitter. ‘I have a feeling that many people in tech will see Warren’s thread implying FB empowers Trump over Warren as unfair,’ Hughes wrote. ‘But Mark [Zuckerberg], by deciding to allow outright lies in political ads to travel on Facebook, is embracing the philosophy behind Trumpism and thereby tipping the scales.

We are constantly pushing toward the apocalypse. Whether it's Judgment Day, suicidal death cults, or freaking out about how we only have five minutes to reverse climate change, the End of Days looms large in our imaginations. Relatively new to the End Times game are the transhumanists, who hope to defer the end for all time. Transhumanists believe that we can integrate humanity with tech to extend life, or even live forever.Transhumanists want us to evolve into a tech-integrated species. This would allow us to extend human life through deferring and even annulling the physical decay that ends in death. Organ replacement, micro repairs with nanotech, and AI integration would decrease likelihood of death by natural causes.

Tech liberates Western women, but it oppresses women in developing nations – not that the tech giants care. Across the globe, tools that empower American women are being reconfigured to cage and degrade women. From the recent innovation that can ‘out’ women in porn, to Saudi Arabia’s use of women-tracking apps, to the surveillance potential of China’s Uighur-tracking systems, women are being colonized by tech. From the washing machine to the smart phone, technology has allowed women to be in control of their own time and space. If we’re walking home late at night, being able to reach out and let a friend know where we are gives a sense of security.

Remember when Donald Trump’s administration courted the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? What about when the American right was still enamored with Big Tech? That seems a long time ago now. On Friday President Donald Trump tweeted: ‘I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!’ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1124447302544965634?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1124447302544965634 Conservatives increasingly accept that Big Tech is a problem, something that stifles creativity and ideas. But will anyone in power ever do anything about it? Sen.

Silicon Valley parents are famously strict about their children’s screen time, even as they dish out their ‘crack cocaine’ technology to the rest of the world’s youth. Last week, however, Tucker Carlson upped the ante: he called on Congress to step and ban children from smartphones, as they do with alcohol. Researchers have demonstrated a link between hours spent in front of a screen and depression and anxiety levels in children. But screen usage damage isn’t just in our heads; increasingly, it’s also in our hands.  ‘Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned,’ reports the Guardian.

A wise meme once said that you should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. If you want to know who said that, you can look it up online. But you don’t need to look it up online, because the internet has freed us all from the bonds of copyright law and common decency. If you did look it up online, you will find that this aphorism was originally popularized in the 1980s in The Jargon File, a computer programmers’ handbook. So needy were the nerds to avenge themselves on the physical world, source of their steamy-spectacled, spotty-faced humiliations, that they tossed this aphorism around without tracking down its source.

So, here’s a proposition — an idea, a notion that might be worth exploring: the computer revolution has saved the small city. Four decades into the digitizing of our lives, some of the unintended and unexpected consequences of computerization are coming clear. And one of those consequences may be the possibilities for success found by some small Midwestern cities. The truly great cities of the nation — New York, Los Angeles — are among the most powerful economic engines ever created. The computer revolution proved to be jet fuel for the economics that brought them out of the doldrums of the 1970s. The large Rust Belt cities — Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit — have either succeeded or failed to find a way out of the collapse of American manufacturing.

Regional inequality is perhaps one of the hardest social issues America faces – the sense that a select few prosperous metropolitan areas increasingly dominate the rest of the country economically, culturally, and politically. Every election, the consequences of this inequality become more evident; it was crucial in electing Donald Trump president in 2016. When Amazon announced last year that it would embark on a mission to find its next headquarters, the (naive) hope was that by spreading around its largesse, some of this inequality could be stemmed. From Birmingham, Alabama to Pittsburgh, cities were teased with the prospect of a once-in-a-lifetime influx of economic stimulus.

The tech sector, we are forever being told, has a gender problem. Recently, for example, Women in Technology International reported that only a quarter of US information technology workers are women – something which it was quick to claim was a result of ‘unconscious bias’. How else, it invited us to ask ourselves, can the proportion of women in technology be so low when women receive 57 percent of college degrees and nearly half of professional degrees in law, medicine, and the physical sciences? Worse, we are led to think, the bias is inbred in the machines themselves.