I’m sure many of you have already seen the ongoing battle between Facebook, and Google, and the Australian government. The government, mostly at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, is about to pass a law that forces the “big tech” companies to negotiate with news publishers to pay them for the content that is linked to on Google News or on Facebook.
I’m hear to argue that this is legitimately insane.
Look, it’s going to take some time, but eventually, it’s coming. We’ve only begun to have conversations around things like Universal Basic Income, or free healthcare, and restructuring the economy. Many, if not most, people are against these things, because they don’t fit with the current world, and frankly, if I thought the world was going to stay the same, I might agree that some of these ideas are probably taking things to far. But, what are we going to do when we simply don’t need as many workers? What does society looks like when AI is doing a lot of the economic work, and 1/3 maybe even 1/2 of the population of any country isn’t needed for work any more?
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I cannot stress this enough, getting rid of anonymity does nothing to stop harassing (look at Facebook?), and only hurts already marginalized people.
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RSS is not gone, quite the opposite. Most people, however, don’t use RSS subscriptions like they did in the old Google Reader days, but RSS is running underneath a whole lot of stuff that we all use every day.
But, I also want to point out that there are a TON of good reasons to use an RSS reader now. Maybe more than there were when Google still had one. As it is, we’ve sort of grown into this habit of letting social media inform us. If there’s some topic we want to know about, we’ll follow some accounts and let the algorithm decide for us what we need to see.
Look how well that’s working out.
I think this is really interesting, because the more information about you there is, the more reasons someone can find to either rule against you, or to do more investigation into you. Which leads to more information about you being available, and round and round we go. “That is in part because algorithms are made…
And this really brings me back to my point, that we do a poor job of truly understanding science, statistics and cause and effect. We believe that algorithms have all been well-thought out, and produce a “true” result, even when they are trying to predict something as unpredictable as what traffic will look like 20 years from now. We assume social science studies are giving us the “right” answer for how to educate people, or train them for the best outcomes, without considering what we are teaching them about the larger world. We assume that we can tweak one belief, or one thing, without human beings reacting to those changes in unpredictable ways, all the while thinking our one change will cause the reaction we DO predict.
We assume a lot that should never be assumed. We over-simplify a world that actually has more influences than we can possibly account for, and assume that what is really a small statistical difference represents a universal truth.
It doesn’t. There are no simple answers. It takes hard work, hard discussions, and lots of listening to figure out the best way forward. Don’t wait for AI to tell you what to do, it may be missing quite a bit.