lesedilino

Google could just buy some of those awesome drones that get realtime multi-gigapixel video for a 15km radius.

In sane countries hate speech is criminalized.

History does not support your naive view that allowing criminals to freely congregate, organize, and recruit stops their ideology.

The Neo-Nazis on reddit have publicized the tactics they're using to normalize racism across the internet. According to watchdog groups the Neo-Nazi movement has grown tremendously since it was able to start recruiting and spreading that hate ideology online.

Aaron Swartz looked back at reddit. He realized the company that made him rich was now nothing but a mechanism to create addictions to meme-bytes, waste time, destroy relationships, normalize sexism and racism, and literally rekindle the Neo-Nazi movement (reddit now has the biggest concentration of Neo-Nazis on the internet--the fanatical kind that even Stormfront won't tolerate on their website).

If this is even the fate for something as benign as reddit, how much worse will it turn out for people working in Big Data or directly on technologies like facial recognition?

How many Silicon Valley technologists will look back at their work in 50 years and have the same kind of feeling that Nazi scientists had, that Manhatten Project physicists had, that the inventors of mustard gas had?

Whether technology will be used as a weapon in the hands of a selfish elite, or as a tool for liberation for the impoverished and underprivileged, is being decided now by how these technologists use their time.

>hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative.

None of you could think of anything better because you're engineers, not psychologists or philosophers.

The "human brain" deals with complexity through:

  * causation
  * hierarchy
  * chunking
  * association
  * ordering

Complexity in general is managed using all the tools of analysis:

  * drawing distinctions
  * drawing similarities
  * making definitions
  * transforming concepts using other concepts

And this is all off the top of my head. It's been years since I took psychology of memory and philosophy of mind. But suffice to say your "top engineer" commenting on stuff outside his specialty and using the stupidity of undergrads to bolster his amateur argument is not convincing and is a pure expression of bathos.

Asking your government to change the laws when your government has shown you have no power over it is a waste of time.

There's a growing intellectual understanding that corporations control the governmental processes from start to finish. Therefore, asking the government to change is stupid.

If the King rules your country, petition the King for mercy.

If an oligarch rules your country, petition the oligarch for mercy.

If a corporate elite rules your country, petition the corporate elite.

Democracy is, quite simply, completely dead. Gone. Done. The government does not institute change based on democratic opinion. You have no control over your government. They aren't the real seat of power in this society.

Having said that, most of the power resides on Wall Street and in the Military-Industrial-Security complex rather than Silicon Valley corporations. But these Silicon Valley corporations are now rich enough to change the laws. They can crown themselves King with the right kind of manoeuvring, and Arrington here is trying to get them to do so.

Petitioning Larry Page or Paul Graham to have a conscience is far more fruitful than voting for the government you want.