As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can’t kill someone and trade with him too. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Technology is anything invented after you were born. Alan Kay
What is this technology? What are we doing with it? What is it doing to us? … Where is humanity heading with this stuff? More than Human: Breakthrough I & II, National Geographic 2015
The idea of trying to find mechanical ways to enhance ourselves is nothing new. ibid.
So this is it: Silicon Valley … There’s Goggle just down here, Tesla, Apple’s headquarters, Facebook, and over there in the distance you’ve got San Francisco … The tech gods here are selling us all a brighter future. But Silicon Valley’s promise to build a better world relies on tearing up the world as it is: they call it disruption. Secrets of Silicon Valley I: The Disruptors, BBC 2017
Start-ups are drawn to Silicon Valley because of another vast industry: venture capital. ibid.
Disruption means what it says. Around the world traditional taxi drivers have protested about Uber undercutting their prices … The reality has been far less liberating. ibid.
There’s a quite brutal form of capitalism unfolding. ibid.
The constant hum of mild paranoia is never far away in Silicon Valley. ibid.
Apple Park will be a modern-day Coliseum … more than $5 billion. ibid.
This is the story of how Silicon Valley’s mission to connect all of us is disrupting politics, plunging us into a world of political turbulence that no-one can control. Secrets of Silicon Valley II
Section 230: ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’ ibid.
The tech gods suck in all this data about how we use their technologies to build their vast fortunes. ibid.
We can hardly move about, surf the internet, communicate or do our shopping without all our data being recorded, stored and analysed, whether its through our smartphone, discount card, e-government login, medical file, search query, digital thermostat or Facebook account. Are we the last generation for whom privacy and freedom was seen as self-evident? The Bureau of Digital Sabotage, PVRO 2014
A dragnet that whistleblower Edward Snowden made visible. ibid.
Can we even exist without these nine companies that control our online communications? And how much leeway do we have to circumvent this invisible digital dragnet? ibid.
Smart technology represents less of a breakthrough in power distribution and more of a revolution in complete constant panopticon surveillance of everyone. The Corbett Report: Data is the New Oil, James Corbett online, November 2017
We’ve gone through a very silly period when we thought that man with his technology was all powerful and could save us from every kind of ill. Magnus Pike, cited The Home that 2 Built s1e2: Seventies
Transitioning from an inflationary world to a deflationary world – people should be scared. There is going to be disruption and that disruption is coming no matter what. There is nothing fundamental that governments can do to stop the rate of technology progress. Jeff Booth, interview The Keiser Report August 2020, author The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
You have technology moving at an exponential pace driving prices down, and governments all around the world [are] caught in an inflationary trap that they created themselves out of monetary policy, fighting that force. And I would ask a simple question – isn’t it good when the value of your money goes up, and prices go down? ibid.
The abundance of technology would be broadly distributed. ibid.
It’s not going to go on for ever no matter what … It doesn’t matter until it does. One giant thing they miss that this is they assume a reserve currency goes on for ever, right, and you can just keep printing and people just trust in your currency. ibid.
What if a country, let’s say China, created a currency and decided to keep on printing for ever, and they used the currency and they used it to buy the world? … Would we trust that currency? ibid.
And so you can see from that thought experiment that if you just keep on printing money, people lose faith in your currency, and so you don’t have a reserve currency any more. So there’s a whole bunch of people like I think are like brainwashed in this ‘debt doesn’t matter’, that this can go on for ever. And it’s going to happen gradually … There is nothing that can stop this. We are going to have deflation for sure. Structurally, technology requires it. The path to get to deflation could end up through hyper-inflation first – currency default, debt default – it could happen a whole bunch of different ways but we are going to have deflation anyhow. ibid.
The concentration of wealth because you’re fighting a natural force – Capitalism can’t work, right, so effectively the Government is the market today. Free market principles don’t work any more. ibid.
Deflation we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. What if next year everything around you got cheaper? All it does is increase the value of your savings, and decrease the value of your assets. ibid.
Why do you think the top five technology companies are at historic heights? ibid.
Everybody knows it. ibid.
More band-aids on a systematic, a structural, change that has to take place. And so what they’re really trying to stop is a revolution, right, but they’re making the revolution more likely. ibid.
When I was there I always felt like fundamentally it was a force for good. I don’t know if I feel that way any more. The Social Dilemma, Netflix 2020
Is social media making your child depressed? ibid. news
Plastic surgeons have coined a new term for it – Snapshot Dysmorphia – when your patients want surgery so they can look more they do in filtered selfies. ibid.
Today I want to talk about a new agenda for technology. And why we want to do that is because if you ask people what’s wrong in the tech industry right now, there’s a cacophony of grievances, and scandals, and they stole our data, and there’s tech addiction, and there’s fake news and there’s polerization and there’s some elections getting hacked – but is there something beneath all these problems? ibid. Tristan Harris
Jaron Lanier: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. ibid.
‘How much of your life can we get you to give to us?’ ibid. Tim Kendall
‘We now have markets that trade in human futures at scale. And those markets have produced the trillions of dollars that have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity.’ ibid. Professor Zuboff
‘We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary … We’ve put deceit and sneakiness at the centre of everything we do.’ ibid. Jaron Lanier
You are being programmed at a deeper level. And you don’t even realise it. ibid.
‘Even knowing how these tricks work, I’m still susceptible to them.’ ibid. expert
‘Everyone in your news feed sounds just like you.’ ibid. Roger McNamee
It’s a disinformation for money business model. ibid.
These things have become digital Frankensteins. ibid.
These markets undermine democracy and they undermine freedom and they should be outlawed. ibid. Zuboff
We investigate the impact in extraordinary advances in medical technology. Saving patients from heart attacks. Implants that allow deaf children to hear. But with high engineering comes high risk. We reveal why a hip replacement could cause long-term health problems for thousands of people ... We question how well the safety regulations protect patients. Dispatches: The Truth About Under the Knife, Channel 4 2011
The ASR hip they are taking out was made by the DePuy Company ... Microscopic fragments can break off in the body. ibid.
San Diego: All the big companies pay the orthopaedic surgeons to work with them. ibid.
They’ve thrown us out of the conference. ibid.
We reveal the rule that allows some medical devices to be implanted in the body with almost no testing at all. ibid.
It may surprise patients that reps are in theatre. ibid.
He also discovered Medtronic had issued a safety notice after receiving reports of five deaths. ibid.
The regulations allow them [companies] to use the evidence of other products already on sale without proving how their own version improves patients. ibid.
It’s the NHS that may have to pick up the tag. ibid.