The Republic: “A national poll in September, one of the first taken after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry regarding the president’s dealings with Ukraine, turned up a plurality of respondents already backing Trump’s impeachment. The spread of opinion was as follows: 42 percent of Americans… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Recommended Books
The World on Two Wheels
Overlooked No More: Annie Londonderry, Who Traveled the World by Bicycle – She cycled away from her Boston home and into stardom, leaving a husband and three small children for a journey that came to symbolize women’s independence. Intrigued by what little he knew of his great-grandfather’s sister, Peter Zheutlin, a journalist, decided to write… Continue Reading
How Legal Professionals Must Lead in the Age of Machines
Law Technology Today – “…Today, legal professionals, of course, spend much of their day interacting with computers. A desktop or laptop computer is the hearth of our workspace, where we do simple tasks like email, as well as complex tasks like using sophisticated systems to analyze data collections. We use our mobile phones, tablets, and ever-present… Continue Reading
The Internet’s Invisible Cleanup Crew
Jacobin – Review of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, by Sarah T. Roberts (Yale University Press, 2019). “Commercial content moderation, or CCM, describes one of the dirtier jobs on the corporate internet: reviewing and removing violent, racist, and disturbing content posted to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube… Continue Reading
The Underworld of Online Content Moderation
The New Yorker interview – The Underworld of Online Content Moderation: “More than a hundred thousand people work as online content moderators, viewing and evaluating the most violent, disturbing, and exploitative content on social media. In a new book, “Behind the Screen,” Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at U.C.L.A., describes how this work… Continue Reading
Jared Diamond: There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050
New York Magazine – Intelligencer: “Jared Diamond’s new book, Upheaval, addresses itself to a world very obviously in crisis, and tries to lift some lessons for what do about it from the distant past. In that way, it’s not so different from all the other books that have made the UCLA geographer a sort of… Continue Reading
Are Robots Competing for Your Job?
The New Yorker – Are Robots Competing for Your Job? Probably, but don’t count yourself out. [For decades the internet heralded the demise of librarians – now it is AI perhaps – but we will still think – not!] “..The old robots were blue-collar workers, burly and clunky, the machines that rusted the Rust Belt.… Continue Reading
Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Intercept: “…An unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a… Continue Reading
Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism
Los Angeles Review of Books – Nicholas Carr’s review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power By Shoshana Zuboff To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley… Continue Reading
Technology has over-saturated us
Axios: “For millennia, technology, in terms of its big-picture impact, was, well, meh. Look at the straight line in the chart — that includes every major invention since the year 1 AD, including the printing press. Then James Watt triggered the Industrial Revolution by reinventing the steam engine, and before you knew it we all… Continue Reading
We Need an FDA For Algorithms
Nautilus – UK mathematician Hannah Fry on the promise and danger of an AI world.” In the introduction to her new book, Hannah Fry points out something interesting about the phrase “Hello World.” It’s never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase—which is frequently the entire output of a student’s first computer program—is supposed… Continue Reading
Book Review – The unmaking of the steady job
The Nation – Ad Hoc Nation – The unmaking of the steady job. Reviewed – Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, By Louis Hyman “…Today’s temps, permalancers, subcontractors, and underemployed do have an advantage that their predecessors didn’t: The effects of the gig economy permeate society more thoroughly and… Continue Reading
