Fantastic podcast from France Culture’s “Les chemins de la philosophie”. Professor Patrick Wotling discusses on the podcast the philosophy of Nietzche and how forgetting can be a condition for the well functioning of social life:
Nietzsche nous apprend que l’oubli est positif, s’éduque, peut se contrôler et surtout qu’il est la condition qui rend possible énormément de choses, comme la vie sociale : le second traité de la “Généalogie de la morale” est fondé sur cette affaire de la tendance à l’oubli qui est une régulation fondamentale du vivant et la manière dont cette tendance à l’oubli peut être régulée, éduquée, contrecarrée, canalisée, représente pour Nietzsche le fondement même de la possibilité d’une vie communautaire. L’oubli est vraiment un processus positif si on le comprend bien.
Listen to the full podcast here.
I quite enjoyed this series from Gizmodo where reported Kashmir Hill tries to not use any of the five big tech companies. It’s especially revealing and perhaps lesser known how important they are on infrastructure of the internet. For example, Amazon hosts a large amount of websites, making it almost impossible to avoid Amazon completely.
Hettie O’Brien writes in an article on The New Statesman on the fantasies of tech solutionism for Irish border:
The logic here is peak Silicon Valley: technology vacates policies of their political intent, offering practical solutions that we can converge on regardless of political differences.
Yet this politics-free vision of the Irish border amounts to magical thinking. It’s not because the necessary technologies don’t exist; many already do. It’s that the proposed solutions, whether visible or not, would effectively monitor everyone and everything that passed across the Irish border, making it one of the most closely observed and therefore political crossings in the world.
Today I learned that there are standards in the patterns of the bumpy parts on pavements ("tactile paving") that help visually impaired people move around. Apparently there are different patterns that have their own meaning, such as when there are steps ahead or near a platform. Check out this video by Tom Scott that focuses on the patterns used in British streets. The standard they use (“Guidance on the use of Tactile Paving Surfaces”) can be found here.
Bloomberg Newsweek made a nice three part video series on the Chinese city Shenzhen. In the series Ashlee Vance gives a balanced view of how this city has grown rapidly over the last 40 years, showing both postive and negative sides of this “futuristic metropolis”. The full three episodes are part of the “Hello World” series and you can watch them here.
Can our phone use shape how we eat our food? A funny article from The Guardian provides some examples of devices to “tailor the dining experience around our phone-centric lifestyles”.
Fareed Zakaria in an article from Foreign Policy on “The End of Economics”:
Let me be clear: Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world. Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world.But in the heady days of post-Cold War globalization, when the world seemed to be dominated by markets and trade and wealth creation, it became the dominant discipline, the key to understanding modern life. That economics has since slipped from that pedestal is simply a testament to the fact that the world is messy. The social sciences differ from the hard sciences because “the subjects of our study think,” said Herbert Simon, one of the few scholars who excelled in both. As we try to understand the world of the next three decades, we will desperately need economics but also political science, sociology, psychology, and perhaps even literature and philosophy. Students of each should retain some element of humility. As Immanuel Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
This is enlightening talk from 1976 with philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Bryan Magee on fundamental questions such as “What is philosophy?”, “Why does it matter?”, and “Why should anybody be interested in it today?”.
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet announced a new tool for urban planners to use. Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project sees it as a good example of surveillance capitalism. Read the full article of The Intercept.
“Replica is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism, profiting from information collected from and about us as we use the products that have become a part of our lives,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project. “We need to start asking, as a society, if we are going to continue to allow business models that are built around exploiting our information without meaningful consent.”
According to this article by The Intercept some prisons in the U.S. are capturing the voices of incarcerated people’s voice to create new biometric databases with their “voice prints”. It seems like another example of the deployment of new technology with the involvement of private companies on more vulnerable groups of people, with all the usual problems of biometrics (eg. reliability) and automated decisions (eg. transparency, explainability).
The enrollment of incarcerated people’s voice prints allows corrections authorities to biometrically identify all prisoners’ voices on prison calls, and find past prison calls in which the same voice prints are detected. Such systems can also automatically flag “suspicious” calls, enabling investigators to review discrepancies between the incarcerated person’s ID for the call and the voice print detected. Securus did not respond to a request for comment on how it defined “suspicious.” The company’s Investigator Pro also provides a voice probability score, rating the likelihood that an incarcerated person’s voice was heard on a call.