Here in the United States, we are about to observe Thanksgiving, and the end of the semester is in sight for many of us! Here are 5 links to some interesting reads (plus a video).
“Network Neutrality Can’t Fix the Internet,” by Ian Bogost. It makes sense to construe broadband and wireless providers as common carriers, like telephone companies and utilities. And a majority of Americans, no matter their affiliation, support regulating internet providers in this manner. But advocates must also acknowledge that the internet is hardly a healthy environment for competition, consumer protection, and equity of use even with net-neutrality guidelines in place.
“Can AI Be Taught to Explain Itself?” by Cliff Kuang. The disconnect between how we make decisions and how machines make them, and the fact that machines are making more and more decisions for us, has birthed a new push for transparency and a field of research called explainable A.I., or X.A.I. Its goal is to make machines able to account for the things they learn, in ways that we can understand. But that goal, of course, raises the fundamental question of whether the world a machine sees can be made to match our own.
“The Tech Industry’s Gender-Discrimination Problem,” by Sheelah Kolhatkar. In 2015, a group of female tech investors and executives conducted a survey of two hundred senior-level women in Silicon Valley. Titled “The Elephant in the Valley,” the study demonstrated how intertwined, and how pervasive, these kinds of discrimination are. Eighty-four per cent of the participants reported that they had been told they were “too aggressive” in the office, sixty-six per cent said that they had been excluded from important events because of their gender, and sixty per cent reported unwanted sexual advances in the workplace.
“The Digital Remains of a Forgotten Future,” by Leslie Jamison. What is second life? The short answer is that it’s a virtual world that launched in 2003 and was hailed by some as the future of the internet. The longer answer is that it’s a landscape full of goth cities and preciously tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rainforest temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs and trippy giant chess games...Many observers expected monthly user numbers to keep rising after they hit 1 million in 2007, but instead they peaked—and have, in the years since, stalled at about 800,000. An estimated 20 to 30 percent are first-time users who never return. Just a few years after declaring Second Life the future of the internet, the tech world moved on.
“The Theory of Visitors,” by Sam Lansky. “All relationships are transient,” she said. “Everything is temporary. People come into your life for a limited amount of time, and then they go away. So you welcome their arrival, and you surrender to their departure. Because they are all visitors. And when the visitors go home, they might take something from you. Something that you can’t ever get back. And that part sucks. But visitors always leave souvenirs. And you get to keep those forever. I thought about this constantly. The visitors. The phrase popped into my head a hundred times a day. It was a little bit sad but a little bit hopeful, like all my favorite things, and it seemed to flick at the funny way people could pass through my life and then be gone forever, ephemeral as ghosts.”
This week’s video is by Zeynep Tufekci:
Lead image is “smoky mountain storms” by evoo73 is licensed under CC BY