#he is also using trump and musk as sort of the 'bad' examples. (like when mental structures are not really aligned with reality lmao) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mariacallous · 4 months ago

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If there is one certainty of social media in 2025, it’s this: Rage clicks rule. Hyperbole, hate, cheap shock—it’s all par for the course—and often rewarded with virality.

But Sez Us, an app just launched by veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, believes it’s possible to change that by punishing users who shitpost for the sake of provocation.

The timing may be just right. America is entering an age of oligarchy with a rising wave of right-wing extremism taking hold of global politics. Platforms like Truth Social and X now operate as effective propaganda machines, recasting culture-war issues over immigration, DEI, and trans rights as boogeymen in President Trump’s new vision of America, which is really just a very old version of America. As the next era of social media comes into view, emerging platforms also have an opportunity to rise to the moment. Can Sez Us, which is positioning itself as the antithesis to X, facilitate a better way forward?

“If you bring back responsibility, ownership, and reputation, then suddenly all the incentives that we have in the real world are back,” says Yevgeny Simkin, Sez Us’ cofounder and chief product officer.

Even as online discourse has devolved into rabid spectacle, platforms like Bluesky have shown there is an appetite for a more civil kind of conversation. Rather than boosting any post that’s getting rage clicks, Sez Us uses what its creators call a “reputation engine,” a feature that allows you to rate another user’s posts on the platform across five key areas: approval, influence, insightfulness, relevance, and politeness.

On the app, ratings determine a user’s reputation score and overall visibility. The higher the score, the more reach you have in the community. Users control who replies to them based on a person’s score, with low-scoring users penalized by having less influence. All posts are visible but you can block users from replying to you, for example, if they don’t have high-approval ratings. Ultimately, ratings are designed to deprioritize engagement based around viral moments.

“It’s not about the moderators coming in and saying ‘you’re bad,’” Simkin says. “It’s about the community saying ‘we don’t like what you’re saying.’ Then I know that I have to temper how I say things. I have to be more polite. I have to be less bombastic.”

In the race to perfect social media, there has never been a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderation—for those who still bother with it. Scale can make this task even more difficult as a platform’s user base grows. For Simkin and his team, the idea was to build a platform that would “bring to the fore all the ways in which social media should be running rather than the way it has been,” he says. “The camel’s back was broken by the straw of Elon [Musk] buying Twitter,” and suddenly a whole new world seemed possible.

The fracturing of Twitter, since rebranded as X, kicked off an arms race among techies who had all sorts of ideas about the next phase of social media, and how to define it. It was during this period, in 2022, that the concept for Sez Us was born, grounded in the lofty goal of bringing back civil discourse.

Returning constructive debate to online discourse is important to Simkin. “I have a particular view on freedom of expression and freedom of freedom because I’m familiar with what it means not to have either,” he says. In 2022, as the Russia-Ukraine war escalated, Simkin, who was raised in Soviet Russia before immigrating to Canada, built Samizdat Online, an anti-censorship platform that allows citizens in totalitarian societies to read news by banned outlets without fear of being tracked and persecuted.

Similar to Bluesky, another new-ish app that has emerged as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X, Sez Us does not own any of your data. It was built using a decentralized social networking protocol, which allows users to move their assets and content across platforms. Bots are kept off the app through mobile verification. Low scores likewise prevent bots and individuals with bad intentions from gaining traction.

“Numbers aren’t the holy grail of this thing,” says Akshay Gupta, the chief operations officer. “Just because you have a massive score doesn't mean you're winning on the platform. It just allows people to know what type of reputation you have.” Even if that is true, reputation scores do ultimately matter in the end. The lower the number, the less reach a user is allowed.

When I mention to Simkin and Gupta that the idea behind its moderation-based scoring reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror, they push back. “We’re not defining what’s civil. It's the Overton window of the community. Whoever is there gets to participate and then those metrics will move,” Simkin says.

Many startup founders have tried, and failed, to design their own version of a digital Elysium. The main obstacle working against emerging social platforms that have launched in the past three years is TikTok. They don’t have its cool, reach, or strange wonder. But that is also their advantage. What the next age of social connection calls for—one of the many things, at least—is not more super platforms but instead purpose-driven communities. It calls for digital rallying grounds of all sorts, ones like Reddit but also like BlackSky, a Bluesky community for Black users, which already mirrors a version of what Sez Us wants to accomplish.

“No new endeavor is going to be dead on out the gate,” Gupta adds. “We’ve got an intention. We have a North Star. And we’re starting to see the behavioral elements of it work. Disagreements are great. We’re not stopping anyone from coming on the platform.” All backgrounds, religious affiliations, and political perspectives are welcome, they say.

It’s hard to know if any of this will work. Right now, Sez Us only has 10,000 active users. And Simkin has measured expectations for what they can accomplish. “I’m not looking to improve humanity,” he says. “That’s somebody else’s job.”

By incentivizing healthy discussion, he says, the plan is “to move technological discourse to a level where people can engage as themselves. The key is to help everybody recognize that we're actually not enemies.” Whether a critical mass of people wants that remains to be seen.

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blockcastcc · 5 years ago

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Wednesday’s Twitter hack would seem to spell regulatory doom for Bitcoin, which is widely distrusted in Washington. Some lawmakers – and U.S. President Donald Trump himself – associate it with crime.

In 2019 Trump tweeted he is not a fan of bitcoin and that “unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior.” He also reportedly told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to “go after Bitcoin.”

But immediately following the hack, lawmakers seemed more focused on Twitter’s security problems rather than cryptocurrency’s role in the hack.

On Wednesday, high-profile accounts belonging to Elon Musk, Kanye West, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, cryptocurrency exchanges and many others were co-opted into a bitcoin scam that netted the hackers at least $100,000. Twitter struggled to resolve the issue, even temporarily blocking verified accounts’ abilities to tweet and reset their passwords. Security experts said the hack was likely deep in Twitter’s system, and therefore is not a quick fix.

Lawmakers were quick to respond.

See also: CoinDesk’s full coverage of the Twitter hack

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a vocal critic of tech platforms, fired off an open letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey soon after the hack went mainstream. The event, he said, “may represent not merely a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents but rather a successful attack on the security of Twitter itself.”

Hawley also asked whether there was a risk that President Trump’s account could have been hacked and how many users might have had their data stolen.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed he had met with Dorsey privately in 2018 and discussed implementing end-to-end encryption of users’ direct messages, which could contain sensitive information and may have been vulnerable during the hack. Wyden says Dorsey told him at the time that Twitter was working on encrypted DMs, but two years later it hadn’t delivered.

Read more: Twitter Hack 2020 Was Probably Done by a Bitcoiner – But Not a Savvy One

“This is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, and one that is not present in other, competing platforms. If hackers gained access to users’ DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact for years to come,” Wyden said in a statement.

Focusing blame

Meanwhile, some crypto supporters in Washington, D.C., aren’t worried the hack will cause lasting damage to the industry.

Coin Center Director of Communications Neeraj Agrawal noted that while Twitter was compromised, Bitcoin (or crypto) was not. And if the hackers’ goal was to make money, they failed miserably: Only a scant $123,200 in bitcoin flowed through the wallet listed, and it’s likely some of those funds were recycled through by the attackers.

The incident shines a spotlight on centralized points of failure, such as one individual on a single platform being able to compromise numerous accounts.

“Somebody who has limited access to the admin panel on Twitter was able to do so much damage because Twitter is a centralized server,” Agrawal said.

Agrawal doesn’t think the incident will have a huge impact on how lawmakers approach crypto.

“Even though maybe it’s been broadcast to more people than ever before, the kind of people who are watching it closely, like policymakers for example, see this and … they’re not surprised by the capability for this,” he said. “I hope that they see this, and they know that there’s nothing new here, there’s nothing to react to when it comes to Bitcoin policy.”

It remains to be seen whether the White House or senior administration officials decide to weigh in, but so far the response from lawmakers has been promising, said Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association.

See also: After the Twitter Hack, We Need a User-Owned Internet More Than Ever

She pointed to a tweet from Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) as one example, noting he explicitly said centralized control was the issue behind Twitter’s hack.

“I would say 99% of policymakers are not thinking about blockchain or cryptocurrency. And so anytime that you have national headlines that deal with a hack of this size and magnitude, and Bitcoin is sort of involved in the process, for the uneducated it’s a bad association because they then think that Bitcoin is sort of a preferred tool of criminals. Those of us that work in the industry and know it, study it, the policymakers who spent the time to learn about it, know that that’s not the case,” Smith said.

Wednesday’s hack may prove to be a teachable moment for the crypto-skeptics, she said. Blockchain analytic firms are already watching the address the scammer used, and exchanges have begun blacklisting it, preventing potential victims from sending any funds to the account.

Agrawal said he hopes there is a conversation about the potential benefits of using crypto, such as by Russian political activists or in trying to avoid currency freezes.

Read more: Russian Activists Use Bitcoin, and the Kremlin Doesn’t Like It

“We got lucky, because hackers have unprecedented access to a massively important system where so much damage [could have happened]. I mean, it’s mind numbing the amount of payoffs they could have caused in a few minutes. But instead they went for bitcoin,” he said.

Criminal opportunities

James Comer (R-Ky.), head of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, also sent a letter to Dorsey demanding the committee be briefed on everything from how quickly Twitter alerted the FBI to whether the hack was conducted by a foreign adversary. Comer, too, expressed concern over where direct messages were vulnerable.

“Twitter’s failure not only created an opportunity for criminals to perpetrate a crime broadcasted to millions of Twitter’s users, but the hackers’ potential breach of Twitter’s security poses broader risks regarding hackers’ access to private direct messages,” he said in the letter.

Senate Commerce Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) also sent Dorsey a letter, though it was less strident than Hawley’s. He said he was concerned about the potential for disinformation to be spread through such a hack, especially via high-profile accounts.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said in a statement shared with CoinDesk the hack could have had “major consequences” on elections, calling on Twitter to “get to the bottom of the hack and implement necessary safeguards” to prevent a repeat.

Read more: Twitter Hack: Chainalysis and CipherTrace Confirm FBI Investigation

On a local level, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed the state to conduct a full investigation into the hack.��

“With more than 300 million users, Twitter is a primary source of news for many, making it a target for bad actors. This type of hack by con artists for financial gain can also be a tool of foreign actors and others to spread disinformation and – as we’ve witnessed – disrupt our elections,” said Cuomo in a statement.

The hack is likely to continue to ratchet up pressure on social media companies, which are already facing scrutiny over content moderation, disinformation and foreign interference.

Disclosure

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

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Mention Elon Musk’s name on the internet, and prepare to face the wrath of the Musketeers. That’s just the way it works now that they — or the Musk Bros, or whatever you want to call the Tesla and SpaceX founder’s horde of devoted fans — are on constant high alert in defense of their chosen leader. For CEOs, it seems that being the object of affection for an increasing number of strangers is now part of the job description.

You don’t exactly have to possess Musk’s gifted, frenetic brain to figure out how we got here: Society has always had heroes, be those of war or art or politics. But entrepreneurs are particularly suited for our current moment, in which success in business is our primary marker of achievement. Business acumen doesn’t just get you money anymore; it can make you the most powerful man in the world.

The signs of CEO worship are everywhere: unprecedented venture capital funding for founders, media overemphasis on company leaders, and to use the most extreme and obvious example, the election of Donald Trump.

Carl Rhodes, co-author of the book CEO Society, notes that CEO worship has even spread to us as individuals. “If you hop onto Amazon and type in ‘CEO’, there’s many self-help books where you can ‘become CEO of your own love life’ or ‘date like a CEO,’ he says. “I can’t imagine what kind of awful date that would be, but nevertheless.”

It’s not a good thing: not for businesses, not for society, and not even for CEOs themselves. To explain why, I asked five scholars, whose reasoning ranges from leadership psychology to moral philosophy. Below, their lightly edited responses.

Jeffrey Moriarty, philosophy department chair at Bentley University

People don’t like complexity or ambiguity. They want to simplify. Pointing to a person as the cause of this or that good or bad event is simple: “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War;” “FDR ended the great depression.” Telling a story about resources, systems, institutions, policies, and practices is a lot messier and more complicated, though likely to be more accurate.

The same goes for business. People want to be able to account for some business success or failure and it is easy to say, “Oh, it was because Jones was at the helm, or because Jones made this decision.”

This is not to say that leadership never matters, or that good decision-making is unimportant. Surely it is. But it’s probably a lot less important in general than people think. Leaders have an interest in perpetuating the belief that leadership is vital to organizational (of whatever kind) performance — it is a source of power for leaders.

Slavish devotion to a leader is incompatible with the kind of critical engagement that is necessary to prevent organizations from going down the wrong path, financially or morally.

Ben Zeller, associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College

CEOs symbolize what we value as a culture. They fit the American self-image of the lone individual who succeeds based on their wits and raw determination. The CEO is the cowboy writ large.

Most people want something to believe in, and in an increasingly secularized age, CEOs offer a new target for devotion. We live in an era of unbridled capitalism, where consuming is what we do as a people.

We create and foster our identities by the clothing we wear, the phones we own, the music we download. Some people invest so much of themselves into the people and companies behind the technology that we consume, that they become effectively secular fundamentalists. If people invest so much of themselves in the ideals of a company or CEO, they will be let down when and if they discover that the company and CEO are driven ultimately by different goals than the consumer.

Carl Rhodes, co-author of CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life

CEO worship, I think, is a feature of the latter stages of neoliberalism. A lot of it can be traced back to the changes in the global, political, economic situation from the 1980s where you had a shift toward a revival of traditional laissez-faire market-based economics. Business people in general have never been really heroic — in the 1960s, the so-called “organization man” was a fairly bland person wearing a gray suit who was thought of as a conformist, so it’s really a contemporary phenomenon to some extent.

If you look at at the phenomenon of Uber, rather than being seen as an employee, [an Uber driver is] positioned as an individual entrepreneur, a kind of mini-CEO of their own life.

The idea is that we see this kind of CEO mentality bleeding out into many other dimensions of life. We see this as quite a dangerous phenomenon because it’s all driven by values around success and individualism and competition and rivalry rather than about more traditional values around democracy, participation, collegiality, community and so forth. So increasingly our whole lives operate as if there’s some kind of competitive market where all we’re supposed to do is beat other people. If you look at Trump’s rhetoric, it’s always about winning. And it’s not just about winning — to prove that you’re winning, you have to have someone else losing.

Dennis Tourish, author of The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership

When people acquire extraordinary power, the effects tend to be rather negative. One business writer has said that being the CEO of the company today is the closest thing to being king of your own country. Well, history suggests that absolute monarchs become absolute tyrants, and that their sense of themselves becomes grotesquely inflated.

And for all sorts of psychological reasons, the more power an individual has, the less sensitive they become to the needs of other people and the less inclined they are to seek out advice in making crucial decisions, and the less likely to take any advice when they actually get it. My own research also suggests that people in that position are reluctant to facilitate critical communication from other people who have less power in making those decisions, so eventually people give up trying to offer it.

If they believe their own hype, they can become like a rock star surrounded by a sycophantic entourage, and the quality of their decisions will inevitably begin to decline. So the more a leader is lionized in the press or more popular they appear to be at one moment, the more wary we should be and the more we should expect a fall from grace to happen at any moment.

[By] encouraging the fallacious view that we need geniuses to run our companies, we’re doing all of ourselves a disservice. There are very few geniuses out there, and there aren’t enough to keep the economy or our organizations healthy. We have to find ways to engage the intelligence, the activism, the enthusiasm, the passion of people at more levels in the organizations that we rely upon.

Arun Sundararajan, professor at NYU Stern School of Business

Part of the American dream is that anyone can succeed like the most successful among us, so there’s an aspirational dimension to looking up to founders and CEOs. I think in particular in the tech space, there’s been a number of founder-CEOs who have not just been fabulously successful, but have also been successful rapidly, and in a context that is familiar to people. If I become a billionaire founder in meatpacking, that’s less a part of everyday life than if I build an app.

I think the key risk for employees and investors — and it’s tied up with the ownership structures that these CEO-founders are creating for their companies where a significant amount of control is retained by the founder — is that [when] the interests of the company or employees start to diverge from the founder, it becomes all the more difficult to make good decisions about what’s the best path forward for the company.

We saw this struggle at Uber recently that led to the founder leaving and a new CEO coming in. That was fraught with tension and difficulty because you had a wildly visible founder-CEO who was revered in certain circles.

From a societal point of view, this has led to certain expectations of entrepreneurship that can be harmful in the long run. We’re entering a phase of modern work where more people are going to have to be individual entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is at the foundation of what the future of work will be like. The visibility and adulation for the founder-CEO can often allocate the resources of society towards that kind of entrepreneurship, rather than the more common kind, which is opening a nail salon or a law practice.

What I see with students: When I say “entrepreneurship,” they think of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. In some ways, I want every undergrad these days to learn about entrepreneurship not so they can go off and create the next billion-dollar company but because I feel like they have to think like entrepreneurs to succeed in tomorrow’s world of business.

Original Source -> CEOs have never been more idolized. 5 experts explain why that’s a problem.

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tekmodetech · 8 years ago

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Everyone hates us, and it’s not because of our sex parties

It was, briefly, the zeitgeist’s good Silicon Valley story: a sex-and-drugs celebration hosted hosted by since-ousted top-tier VC Steve Jurvetson, at an official Draper Fisher Jurvetson occasion,attended by a number of billionaires together with Elon Musk. So mentioned Paul Biggar, founding father of CircleCI, in a widely read Medium post, increasing on Self-importance Truthful’s excerpt of Emily Chang’s new e-book.

(To be clear, it was Axios who subsequently named Jurvetson and DFJ.)

Is that really what occurred? Did a serious Valley VC agency host a decadent sex-and-MDMA celebration as a part of considered one of its official occasions smack within the midst of final yr’s widespread sexual-harassment revelations? Uhhhhhh. Nicely. Because it seems, not a lot. Biggar notes that he didn’t truly see something outrageous or salacious occurring by the point he left, and, it appears others have vouched that, afterwards … such issues continued to not occur:

I wish to share some longer remarks on the so-called Silicon Valley elite “intercourse celebration” that’s making the rounds. (Be warned: the reality is boring.) http://pic.twitter.com/T4BrLTeFof

— Mason Hartman (@webdevMason) January 12, 2018

In equity to Chang, she was writing about secret Valley intercourse events normally, talked about in passing that “whereas some events could also be devoted primarily to medicine and sexual exercise, others could boast simply pockets of it,” and cited this specific occasion — and a girl there being given medicine by one man, after which hit on by one other in an inappropriate and exploitative means — for instance.

So what occurred at that celebration? It seems like the reply is “at the least two cases of shitty habits that are principally, infuriatingly, fairly typical examples of how the tech business treats ladies.” However it additionally sounds prefer it was principally a reasonably tame, if themed and Burning-Man-ish, occasion which some culturally conservative individuals noticed and instantly misinterpreted as a intercourse celebration.

Which is strictly why I name it the right Silicon Valley story: everyone seems to be on the lookout for lightning-rod causes to hate the Valley proper now. The sex-party narrative is sort of a Rorschach excuse. Proper-wingers can condemn it for instance of tech’s corrupt, decadent liberalism. Leftists can excoriate it as an example of tech’s bone-deep sexism and exploitative hegemony of privileged white males.

This is only one particularly vivid instance. Slings and arrows from throughout the political spectrum are being aimed toward tech. Liberals level out that it has handled ladies abominably for many years, whereas Asians face a “bamboo ceiling” and different nonwhite persons are all however excluded; they blame Fb for the election, Twitter for permitting Donald Trump and neo-nazis to run rampant, Amazon and Google for avoiding taxes, and many others.

Conservatives, in the meantime, accuse tech of a scarcity of “viewpoint diversity” — which bespeaks a weird miscomprehension that their perception techniques are rejected purely as a result of they’re totally different, when the truth is they’re rejected as a result of climate-change denialism, and denying the systemic oppression of people that weren’t born white males, are as demonstrably & morally incorrect as e.g. flat-eartherism and eugenics, and handled accordingly. Barely extra plausibly, they accuse Fb of censoring conservative information, whereas targeting Twitter for shadow-banning right-wingers.

Whereas the “shithole” story continues to dominate on mainstream retailers, over within the RW media universe, Breitbart nonetheless giving all its consideration to allegations Twitter is biased in opposition to conservatives… http://pic.twitter.com/mpgJO0ceke

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 12, 2018

However wait, there’s extra! Because the rent crisis wracks America, its victims, determined for reasonably priced housing in fascinating locations, hate the tech business for gentrifying the cities — San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC, Boston, and many others — the place individuals most wish to reside.

In the meantime, because the media hemorrhages cash, it turns into ever extra reliant on Fb and Google — whilst that duopoly devours a lot of the promoting that used to go to the media. And as each media and finance go tech, East Coasters (and Londoners) see that their center-of-the-universe affect, which they as soon as thought unassailable, has moved to California and past. Is it actually that stunning, while you observe the cash, that the American media’s love affair with the tech business is coming to a bitter and more and more livid finish?

The explanation why is clear. We have now the cash, now. Seven of the ten largest publicly traded firms on the earth are tech firms, and three of them are headquartered inside biking distance of each other in Silicon Valley, surrounded by a nimbus of dozens of unicorns. With that wealth comes big (at the least perceived) energy — not simply monetary, however the energy to form the longer term, to affect the lots, to form mass political actions.

Do you see a variety of standard narratives whose heroes are privileged, unelected engineers and buyers whose beforehand sizable wealth has grown into immense riches and massive energy? Uh, no. Actually you’ll have observed that, in just about each standard story, such persons are the bad guys. There’s a purpose for that: traditionally, energy corrupts.

Folks in all places are already anticipating lightning-rod trumped-up causes to hate the Valley and the tech business as a complete. And it’s not like we haven’t given them at the least just a few actual ones. So it may be time to start out considering much less about cash and energy, and extra about values, and the way we’d truly make sacrifices in service of these values — as a result of historical past signifies that blatant, widespread hypocrisy is considered one of a number of efficient methods to remodel a lightning rod into an indignant mob wielding pitchforks and torches.

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businessweekme · 8 years ago

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Nobody Is Ready for the Rise of the Killer Robot: Tobin Harshaw

It was another busy year for everybody’s favorite automotive-industry disruptor, space-travel visionary and potential James Bond villain Elon Musk. Tesla surpassed Ford and General Motors in market capitalization; the Gigafactory began churning out lithium-ion batteries; his neighborhood roofing company began installing solar panels that aren’t crimes against architecture; he’s sending two rockets to Mars; he started digging a giant tunnel under Los Angeles; and he dissed President Donald Trump over the Paris Climate Accord. (OK, he had a few misses too; just ask anybody on the Model 3 waiting list.)

Given all this, you may have overlooked another of Musk’s 2017 initiatives: saving humanity. Last summer, he and a bunch of other tech-industry A-listers — including Google’s artificial-intelligence guru Mustafa Suleyman — wrote a letter to the United Nations urging a ban on killer robots. The future dystopia they anticipate would make you nostalgic for Skynet:

Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s Box is opened, it will be hard to close.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon was also writing a letter — its 2018 budget request asking Congress for $13 billion in science and technology money and another $10 billion for space-based systems. With all respect to Mr. Hyperloop, he’s going to find the military-industrial complex a much tougher foe than the dinosaurs of Detroit.

Nonetheless, as somebody who’s a tad nervous to be alone in the house with Alexa, I’d like to think there are folks involved with autonomous weaponry who share Musk’s concerns, if not his tired mythological metaphors. So this week I found one such person: Robert H. Latiff, the author of “Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield.”

Latiff retired from the Air Force as a major general in 2006, last serving as the director of advanced systems and technology at the National Reconnaissance Office. Since then, he has worked in the defense industry and as a lecturer at Notre Dame and George Mason universities. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:

Tobin Harshaw: General, you left the military more than a decade ago, so why come out with this book now? Did your experiences in the private sector and academia inform your view of the “new global battlefield”?

Robert Latiff: Well, I’d actually been thinking of this since back around the time of the invasion of Iraq. When I saw some of the things that were going on, not the least of which was Abu Ghraib, they bothered me a lot. Then I went to work, as you might expect, as a defense contractor, and it was not a bad job. But neither there nor while I was in the military did I actually hear anyone ask whether we should be doing some of the research we were doing. You know, some of it was a little scary — I don’t know that it was necessarily unethical — but nobody ever asked the question.

TH: Can you give an example or two?

RL: Generally, some of the things that had to do with biology were a little frightening, things like synthetic biology where you don’t really know the ultimate implications. And some of the work with electromagnetics was a little scary, particularly as it had to do with humans and lethality.

TH: Got it. So you spent some time in the private sector, and …

RL: When I finally left and began teaching and doing consulting I had some time and these things were still bothering me, and I contacted the people at Notre Dame. They jumped at the chance of having me put together a course, which became hugely popular. Ultimately I was asked to write a book nominally but not totally based on the course I was teaching.

TH: And how did the students at Notre Dame react to the material?

RL: First of all it frightened them a little bit. I think they were probably more surprised than anything else. Many of them had never had any exposure to the military at all.

When you start talking to them about some of the newer weapons, it kind of blew their minds. For many of them the first response was, “Yeah we’ve got to do this.” But when I started asking them to think about the ethical implications, they sort of stepped back from that, and I think they really got a lot out of it.

TH: As long as there’s been warfare, there have been arguments about the ethics of warfare. Thomas Aquinas’s “just war” theory is probably the most famous. As we look at today’s technologies, which ones raise the biggest questions for you viewed in that long tradition?

RL: I think that artificial intelligence and autonomy raise probably the most questions, and that is largely because humans are not involved. So if you go back to Aquinas and to St. Augustine, they talk about things like “right intention.” Does the person who is doing the killing have right intention? Is he even authorized to do it? Are we doing things to protect the innocent? Are we doing things to prevent unnecessary suffering? And with autonomy and artificial intelligence, I don’t believe there’s anybody even in the business who can actually demonstrate that we can trust that those systems are doing what they should be doing.

TH: Well, we know that a lot of people are worried about this. Last year a bunch of tech-industry bigshots wrote a letter to the U.N. urging a ban on killer robots. There was a group that held a meeting in November, under the authority of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons that tried to get the ball rolling on a global ban. To me, this honestly sounds like a lot of do-gooder nonsense. But do you think an international effort can be made to limit the sort of apocalyptic level of things that people worry about?

RL: I do think that there is, and there should be. Incidentally, the people who are supporting this weapons ban actually contacted me at one point. And my response to them was that I don’t think it’s do-gooder nonsense. I think it’s the right intention but it’s the wrong approach. And let me explain. First, I don’t think bans ever work. And second, I don’t believe developed nations are going to participate in a ban. And so whenever you ban something, pretty much it just goes underground and you can’t police it because in international law there’s no policing.

I am a big fan of arms-control agreements and nonproliferation agreements. Countries like the U.S. and Russia and China, they’re going to do this regardless. And if we could create some kind of arms-control agreement where we could maybe limit the things that we do collectively and have some kind of verification regime — and more importantly, agree to try to at least contain the proliferation — that would be a step forward. Yes, places like North Korea and other rogue nations and ISIS, they’re ultimately going to get some of this stuff. But it would be a lot easier to police and verify an arms-control agreement than a ban.

TH: I’m also a big fan of nuclear nonproliferation agreements. But with that, we’re talking about major hardware and a vast industrial base that you need to build the stuff, and then actual nuclear material that is hard to produce and hard to hide. Whereas with AI and cyber weapons, production is pretty easy to hide. How do you do verification?

RL: Well, that is the question of the day, and I don’t have any pithy answers, other than to the extent that we can create some sort of verification agreements. The major powers are pretty good at that. With today’s agreements, we have overflights of Russia and they’ll overfly us, and we’ll take satellites over there and they’ll bring satellites to look at us.

So with new technologies, we’ll need to get some opportunity to just go into these laboratories and see what they’re doing, and we’re pretty good at projecting what their real capabilities are. I don’t know exactly what a regime would look like, but it would clearly be better than just having a ban and trying to find the needle in the haystack.

TH: A few months ago I interviewed former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, who oversaw the Barack Obama administration’s cutting-edge Pentagon modernization.. He calls this initiative the “third offset,” and says it is necessary because our great-power competitors, Russia and China, are achieving parity with our “second-offset” guided munitions and integrated battle networks. Do you view the challenge of the future in that same way?

RL: I do and I agree with the secretary that they really caught up with us. Just look at the recent demonstration of Russian cruise missiles in Syria — those were pretty good cruise missiles. With things like autonomy and artificial intelligence and hypersonic weapons and electromagnetic weapons, if they have not achieved parity, they’re coming up really quite fast. So we won’t have the third offset for nearly as long as we had the second offset.

TH: Right — the advantages of the first two offsets, first in nuclear technology and then in precision weapons, lasted decades. This one is probably more short- to medium-term. So, given that, which of these new technologies should the Pentagon be focused on?

RL: I think we still have an advantage in autonomy and cyber. I think the one that worries me more than any of the others, and it isn’t clear to me that we actually have an advantage, is electronic warfare. I’m not necessarily talking just about huge nuclear electromagnetic pulses, I’m talking about everything from very small electronic warfare to great big electronic warfare.

TH: Such as jamming systems?

RL: Well, jamming systems is one. Or electronic pulses that could either destroy or interfere with some of our electronic systems. It’s a little bit like cyberwarfare, but it’s using electromagnetic pulses. And then battlefield weapons that incorporate microwaves and things like directed energy beams.

TH: So, not just killer robots, but also “Star Trek” phasers. Speaking of which, we know that outer space is, under U.N. treaty, supposed to remain unweaponized. But I think it’s on the verge of getting weaponized pretty quickly. China, Russia and even countries like India are putting a lot of money into space. Do you think we need a space nonproliferation effort?

RL: I would personally welcome a space nonproliferation effort. Again, I think the major powers are probably not anywhere near wanting to do that. When you say “Star Wars” or “Star Trek,” I don’t worry so much about that — battles going on in space. I even don’t worry about the stationing of weapons in space that might have an effect on the Earth. If you know anything about physics and orbital mechanics, that’s just way too expensive.

What I do worry about is that the U.S. — and increasingly China and Russia — is extraordinarily dependent on space systems. Everybody knows that. And so a ground-based anti-satellite system, or lasers or electromagnetics that might interfere with the functioning of our very critical space systems, or even on-orbit systems that might interfere with or ultimately perhaps destroy one of our satellites — these are all extremely worrisome.

TH: What else keeps you up at night?

RL: The whole approach that the DoD is taking to autonomy worries me a lot. I’ll explain: They came out with a policy in 2012 that a real human always has to be in the loop. Which was good. I am very much against lethal autonomy. But unlike most of these policies, there was never any implementing guidance. There was never any follow-up. A Defense Science Board report came out recently that didn’t make any recommendations on lethal autonomy. In all, they are unusually quiet about this. And frankly, I think that’s because any thinking person recognizes that autonomy is going to sneak up on us, and whether we agree that it’s happening or not, it will be happening. I kind of view it as a head-in-the-sand approach to the policies surrounding lethal autonomous weapons, and it cries out for some clarification.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

The post Nobody Is Ready for the Rise of the Killer Robot: Tobin Harshaw appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

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#Security and Defence #AI #elon musk #robots

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astudentscribe-blog · 8 years ago

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Tech Dopes and Politics

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/3/15904484/pincus-hoffman-linkedin-zynga-clinton-win-the-future-democrats-dnc-trump

This became MUCH longer than I thought, and yeah, it’s a slog.

Oh, where to begin with this shitstorm. Let’s start with some snark and then move onto more serious concerns (though really, it’s not like those are going to be held too far apart because good lord).

This is the kind of idea that two dopes in a sitcom or movie would be talking about to anyone who would listen. They’re young, white, male, and rich, though not necessarily in that order. They’re tired with politics or the delivery business or media - really, the exact what they’re tired of doesn’t matter so much as the disdain for “X as usual” (which they never really define nor care to). They’ve got this great idea though - “what if you could change the way X worked with just a click? Introducing, Win The Future! (with a giant poster board of a “WTF” logo in simplistic font, probably with some kind of geometric-esque symbol for branding)”

Everyone, except maybe the most gullible person, or someone who has no idea how politics or the internet work, in the room look at these two like they’re probably high. They never get mentioned again, except as a brick joke several acts later, and only in a positive light if the writers are trying a “take that” at consumerism and such. You’ve probably seen something like this in numerous versions of media, enough that I don’t even have to really give a specific scene because the idea of two rich novices trying to tell everyone EXACTLY what will fix their problems is built into satiric writing. Shit, the Big Bang Theory’s probably done this more times than years I’ve been alive.

In this article? Played completely straight. No winks, no asides (except one kinda-sorta-maybe), just two scrappy underdogs with degrees from little-known universities like UPenn, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, armed with only $5 billion between themselves, trying to change the world. The underdogs in question: Mark Pincus, co-founder of Zynga (of Farmville fame, among others), and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn (the eternal punchline of social media platforms).

I’m trying not to dip into ad hominem too much here because there are plenty of smart, compassionate, self-aware people who happen to be wealthy, I’m sure. Not most of them and certainly not the ones you hear the most about, but I’m willing to grant that not everyone with an income over $250k a year is an abominable moron divested from reality. But as the tone may suggest, I’m skeptical.

And it certainly does little to suggest you fit in that category when you spout this nonsense:

“It’s become this competitive insider’s world,” said Pincus, who has donated nearly $2.5 million to candidates and causes, according to federal records. "Whether it’s me or my family and friends … we just feel - we’ve always felt - left out. It just feels like the bar is so high for any of us to have a voice and choice.”

Setting aside for a moment the gurgling rage that threatens to dispose of my ability to construct coherent thought, the lack of self-awareness in those three sentences is almost staggeringly funny. It almost makes me think the writer was trying to slip an aside in about how absurd that statement is, coming from that source, but given a) it’s from recode and b) the generally positive tone of the piece, it seems unlikely.

Mark Pincus is from the neighborhood in Chicago were the terms “Trixie” and “Chad” sprung up to describe the young affluent type who was as vapid as they were wealthy, and boy does it seem to fit. Pincus’ career tab on his wiki page goes, “Before he became an entrepreneur, Pincus worked in venture capital and financial services,” which is shorthand for ‘he wasn’t quite rich enough to buy an island, but enough to make some really dumb purchases at the yacht dealership” and was rich enough to be “an early investor’ in basically every major social media platform of the early-00s. Richard Hoffman has a similar setup, growing up in Palo Alto and Berkeley, attending Stanford and Oxford, becoming an “angel investor” and investing in too many startups to list here for practical purposes. They are, if you hadn’t guessed, both white, live/work in the Silicon Valley area, and incredibly well-connected (Hoffman’s a member of the Bilderberg Group, if you ever want to fantasize about the closest thing to the Illuminati in real life).

This is not to diminish anything good either of them has done. Jury’s out on social gaming’s ultimate effect on society, but I lean towards neutral at worst, and it’s been helpful to people in all sorts of ways, and Zynga upended the market and general consensus on that. Hoffman, while being one of the guys behind PayPal (yeah, another one), a member of Microsoft’s board and has a history of investments in Facebook and Airbnb, is probably most notable for a number of tech-related philanthropic endeavors and was the money behind Crisis Text Line.

The notion they’re advocating, of a more democratic process, is not a bad one at all and if we’re choosing between folks like these two and Peter Thiel or even Mark “I’m So Normal Guys Look I’m Going To Iowa” Zuckerberg, I’m with Hoffman and Pincus any day (Never mind that a world relying on the deep pockets of tech billionaires for political reform makes me gag). But to call these two anything but “insiders” is a fundamental failure to grasp how much power and access that the people with lots of money (remember: $5 billion between them) have compared to the vast majority of voters in this country.

And, you guessed it, it gets worse. The only platform items that the WTF (I still cannot fucking believe) have committed to far are “Whether or not they believe engineering degrees should be free to all Americans, and if they oppose lawmakers who don’t call for Trump’s immediate impeachment” per the article above. Which, uh, that’s cool how about college for everyone not just engineers (while super important and underappreciated), and second, again, uh yeah but that has the same effect as threatening to boycott space travel: the people who agree with you are already there, the people who dislike it aren’t gonna move (especially for you), and there’s really no practical effect that’ll happen in the near term (i.e. Elon Musk loses it Howard Hughes-style, Spruce Goosing our way to space and when a Democratic majority takes the House, for space and Trump respectively).

Worse, in the same vein as saying they’ve “felt left out” the article details an approach that is, well, concerning.

In politics, though, Pincus sees a similarly — needlessly — complex game. Replace the Xbox controller maybe with the impenetrable machinations of Congress, where bills and markups and votes are often the stuff of hard-to-discern theater. So, too, are the costs of playing increasingly high at a time when political money can — and does — flow uninhibited to campaigns in the forms of hard-to-track nonprofits and super PACs.

Simple things are not bad - simple ideals like universal health care, college tuition for all, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay for equal work, guaranteeing the right to vote for every person in the Constitution are all ones I’ve heard Democrats talk about and I for one embrace enthusiastically. But this isn’t about simplicity of ideal, this is simplicity of process - and democracy, even the lacking measures that are so often twisted or bandied about for gaining power, is inherently messy and complicated. It’s designed that way, because if something is simple, then it is easy to manipulate and seize control of. Tech guys, more so than most businesses it seems, are all about efficiency - getting down to basics, streamlining workflow and production, which again! All good things! But politics and civic service is not a business, and it cannot be operated on the same principle of a business - those in power have to be held accountable, and that means you will inevitably sacrifice some efficiency. Not the kind of partisan wrangling and obstructionism (again rooted in accumulating power rather than serving the people or process, but that’s another rant for another day) that has been a problem for the last two decades, and for both parties but predominantly the GOP; complexity is not a vice - if we wanted simple and efficient, we’ve had plenty of examples and most of them we’ve fought wars again at one point or another.

No, this kind of simple suggests that you just don’t want to learn or be troubled to get your hands dirty in what you see as a nasty business, the holier-than-thou kind of simple. It’s the kind of simple where you run into a problem you can’t fix with a check or a call to someone you know, so you call the system broken and impenetrable and fund-raise or petition based off of the frustrations of other people, usually those who have far less money, power, access, or time than you do. It is the simple that is based off of good intentions because it’s easy and you’re scared and you’ve seen the other side go for easy and simple and win, even while lying or rejecting reality entirely. “He doesn’t speak like a politician, he thinks like one of us! He’s authentic!”

And now this is the part where I have to make more in the way of conjecture rather than history and background, but it’s equally important.

As a general rule, Pincus told me in June, WTF aspires to be “pro-social [and] pro-planet, but also pro-business and pro-economy.”

I said this already on twitter, but how can you much more of a useless “both sides” centrist techie stereotype can you be? Other, just as useful ideas from this platform:

"We’re pro-puppy, but also pro-kitten."

"Pro-blue skies but pro-clean water.”

“Pro-justice AND pro-equality”

Also, “pro-social” - whatever the fuck THAT means - is the only mention of anything in the ballpark of issues of racial justice, economic inequality, women’s rights, LGBTQ issues, and more. Hold onto that for a moment.

The exact direction is up to its supporters, who can steer the organization through the campaigns they choose and promote, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that WTF seeks to push Democrats further to the political left.

“I’m fearful the Democratic Party is already moving too far to the left,” Pincus said. “I want to push the Democratic Party to be more in touch with mainstream America, and on some issues, that’s more left, and on some issues it might be more right.”

Yeah, this is pretty concerning, especially given a long list of failed centrist political programs like No Labels or Americans Elect. Both of those groups (which, disclaimer, the latter I signed up for with its “national online primary” in 2012) tend to focus towards “fiscal responsibility” and “treating America like a business” and policy like a balanced budget amendment (nope) and tone policing stuff like you see from Peggy Noon or David Brooks. It usually couches this in “both sides are bad” rhetoric or in the case of some more progressive elements, decries both parties as being basically the same (see: “She’s no better than Trump!” for a more progressive take on it with 2016).

What WTF isn’t: “Pro-politician,” Pincus said. “So we’d like to see either political outsiders or politicians who are ready to put the people ahead of their career.”

And then we circle back to the “simple because it’s easy” route, where anyone can look at the current White House and go “jesus christ, I don’t have any experience but I can certainly do better than that!” Because politicians are an easy target (boy howdy do I know that) and it’s easy to find things in the political system that seem antiquated or archaic or overly coated in red-tape and you can sure bet that some of them are. But it’s the one we’ve got, and making another out of whole-cloth should terrify anyone who understands half of what that’d entail.

Time to come back to that idea I said to hang onto at the top of the page, “pro-social.” As I noted, there is not one mention of what are commonly referred to as “social issues” - LGBTQ rights, civil rights, women’s rights, all of which (if the names didn’t tip you off) tend to be about what the folks in power already have and minorities tend to not. There’s one mention of immigration policy, and that’s in the context of the Muslim travel ban being a catalyst for rounding up an email list of wealthy white liberal donors, and “affordable healthcare” is similarly piled into that one block quote from said email. And that’s frankly not surprising.

These two, and pretty much everyone else mentioned or sniffed at for this idea, is of that rich, white, male, and young demographic I talked about back in the beginning of this novella. So, no, it’s not surprising - it is still frustrating, and dangerous because it begets ideas like this:

Initially, Pincus had planned to solicit feedback at launch on recruiting a potential challenger to Democrats’ leader in the House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in a primary election. That idea is on hold — for now — but Pincus and Hoffman are still trying to solicit candidates to run elsewhere as so-called “WTF Democrats.” For Pincus, one of his early targets: Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind. The two have met in recent months, in fact.

At first, Pincus planned to pitch potential supporters on challenging Pelosi, an audacious move at a time when insurgent Democrats are wondering if her leadership in the House has given Republicans too much opportunity to go on the attack. Days before the launch of WTF, however, the Zynga leader opted against proposing such a plan. (Asked if he backed a fight to unseat Pelosi, Hoffman told me hours earlier he was “waiting to see,” but stressed that he’s “certainly not opposed to it.”)

Also on Pincus’s potential target list: California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who he derided as a “career politician.” Feinstein also isn’t an introductory target for WTF, but Pincus said he’s already had conversations with folks like Jenkins, the frontman of Third Eye Blind, about someday challenging her.

Pelosi and Feinstein, two of the most powerful women in Congress, are the only listed targets this group has been public about so far. The only reason for doing so seems to be that they’re folks who have been in politics for decades and based in the San Francisco area. You could say it’s the “career politicians” thing (see: No Labels for an example of another centrist group that talks about experience in political arenas like leprosy) but that doesn’t really add up. There are Democratic leaders in Congress like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York (18 years in the Senate, another 18 in the House), Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont (42 years in the Senate), Steny Hoyer of Maryland (36 years in the House), or John Lewis (elected just months prior to Pelosi in 1987); all of which are senior to Pelosi and Feinstein, but with zero mention - and while you can make arguments that careerism has influenced any and all of the individuals I just listed along with Pelosi and Feinstein, only the latter two are singled out as public targets.

Yeah, you can probably guess the difference, but here it is: tech companies are shit when it comes to women in their midst. Tech culture (and venture capital and business in general and… ad infinitum) is notorious brutal to break into, and even more so for women who often deal with harassment, stagnant wages, lack of promotion, and hostile atmosphere. The most visibly toxic results of tech culture’s osmosis into society are, unfortunately, displayed often enough on Twitter and the White House (and sometimes at the nexus of the two), but it also manifests itself in ways that are, in the big picture, subtle or even benign in their appearance, but have the overall effect of leaving women on the outside of policy and power - and leading to bullshit like Viagra being covered by every fucking insurance plan in the known universe, but birth control being a coin toss (at best) prior to the ACA.

Ridding Congress of the deadwood is a popular drumbeat and has been more or less since there’s been a Congress to campaign about, and especially against. But kicking out people based solely on the fact that they’ve been there for a long time is a great way to ensure that the folks who make up the institutional memory of how to get things done and passed (see the current Republican Congress as to how important it is to have the folks who know how to make a deal and negotiate with the other party). And when it’s clear that you’re only thinking of doing that, at first blush, to the women in power, including arguably the most efficient and successful political operative the House has seen since Henry Clay?

Yeah, fuck that nonsense. I’ll ride with Nancy Pelosi and complexity any day over two rich bros who think they know just how to fix all our problems with one easy solution.