TagMark Steyn
What Your News Feed Will Look Like If Big Tech Runs It
Reading Elkus’s essay, one wants to ask, “Who is the collective ‘we’ who are supposed to be out of control?”In an essay at The New Atlantis, Adam Elkus, a graduate student in computational social science at George Mason University, reflects on a curious change in public panics in recent years: Pundits’ obsession with AI doom has given way to “primal fear of primates posting,” with demands that top government or Big Tech crack down on social media: Once upon a time — just a few years ago, actually — it was not uncommon to see headlines about prominent scientists, tech executives, and engineers warning portentously that the revolt of the robots was nigh. The mechanism varied, but the result was always the same: Uncontrollable machine self-improvement would one day overcome humanity. A dismal fate awaited us. We would be…
“Disinformation”: Do We Really Need a “Reality Czar”?
Canada dodged a bullet in 2014. The United States will not be so lucky if it adopts Big Tech's new proposals against “disinformation” onlineRecently, a New York Times technology columnist, back from a consult with Big Tech in Silicon Valley, urged U.S. President to appoint a “reality czar” to go after people who provide “disinformation” online. He concedes, “It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant.” Well yes, rather. And the czar would probably soon find himself in conflict with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Kevin Roose (pictured), who says he has spent several years tackling “our national reality crisis”, begs us to hear the czar’s supporters out: This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems. (For example, it could formulate “safe…
“Brilliant Vision” from a Century Ago Foretells Today’s Internet
In E. M. Forster's dystopia, people interact only through the MachineIn a wholly materialist environment, science and other disciplines have, by preference, ceased to explore anything but their own ideas.
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Social Media Censorship? Governments Weigh the Options
The United States may be going in the opposite direction from other Western countries
How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Our Language
Culture critic Mark Steyn reflects on the Matrix and the red pill, which seems to be everywhere
Google branches out into politics
Unfortunately, the only political model it would likely know is: One-party stateThe unchallenged manipulation of search engine results during elections is a new phenomenon made possible by the domination of the internet by a few big players.
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