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Mark Zuckerberg's Resolution Is To Talk About Tech's Place In Society (engadget.com)
In the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to create an AI assistant for his home and committed to learning Mandarin. This year he's planning to hold a number of public discussions about how technology plays a role in the future of society. Engadget reports: "I'm an engineer, and I used to just build out my ideas and hope they'd mostly speak for themselves," he wrote in a Facebook post. "But given the importance of what we do, that doesn't cut it anymore. So I'm going to put myself out there more than I've been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go." Zuckerberg plans to hold talks with "leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields" every few weeks. He'll make the discussions available on his Facebook and Instagram feeds or elsewhere. Engadget suggests Zuckerberg "might be best served to directly focus on restoring trust with Facebook's two billion users and fixing the vast array of problems with which his platform is struggling, including privacy screwups and a tanking stock."
Mr Zuckerberg has been repeatedly ask to attend meetings in the UK and Brussels to explain the practices undertaken by his company and the way that those practices impact the citizens of the UK and the broader EU.
Now that Mr Zuckerberg has made this fresh commitment to going and meeting with people, I'm sure that his administration staff are already in the process of reaching out to make his appointments on the other side of the Atlantic.
What's that you say? No? Well, this is just more drivel then.
Actions speak louder than words.
The natural state of technology is to advance by becoming more efficient, effective, and to encompass and sometimes replace more of what we do.
We're near (perhaps already past) the point where we should ask ourselves: how much DO we want technology to take over our lives? Cyberpunk posits a possible future where technology has degraded the value of humanity, but we should ask ourselves what aspects of technology lead to such degradation, and how can we reap the benefits of technology while avoiding those aspects?
For an example, I'm reminded of a virtual reality conference in Las Vegas a few years ago, where a local brothel encouraged conference-goers to have sex in reality rather than in virtual reality. It's easy to snicker at that now, but imagine when the difference becomes blurrier, that might not be such a preposterous plea. If sex in virtual reality becomes more convenient, safe, and pleasurable than real-world sex; what kind of side-effects could that have to society, or to gender relations? Such VR sex (with NPCs) would arguably degrade the value of human sexual relationships.
I'm not saying society can (or should) stop technological development, just that people may want to go through 'technology planning' (a la family planning) at some point in their lives, to decide how much they want it to pervade their personal lives. Banning usage of degrading technology will become increasingly futile over time, as deployment becomes easier; it's more plausible that society will change to accept what they must and avoid what they can and want to.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Everything this man does is focused on his business in making money. In this case, one should focus on this statement:
"the tradeoffs we face"
This is just a continuing damage control tour where he will very careful phrase things to make government officials believe that he should be allowed to do what he does because it's necessary for his business model. The reality of the situation is there may be trade offs, but it should be a decision left up to the consumer. The consumer should has the easy, straightforward ability to opt in of every type of data collection. Otherwise they are by default opted OUT. The problem right now is that by default, every person on the planet is opted IN and has no way to tell the corporations and governments to stop collecting data on them.
He'll even try making the point that they have to know who you are and what you are doing so that they won't collect the data. This is the famous "send us all your nude pics so we can make sure we don't post them somewhere". Again - the reality to that situation is to enforce a stop on all anoonymous data collection as well that ties back to any single entity. Because even that can easily be distilled back down to the individual through geolocation and other means.
Stop collecting data on us you assholes.