https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/automating-the-professions-utopian-pipe-dream-or-dystopian-nightmare
Related: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/19/robot-based-economy-san-francisco
[Update] Driverless Cars and Privacy in the Future
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/self-driving-cars-and-the-looming-privacy-apocalypse/474600/
Facts versus Data
“Michael P. Lynch
is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us:
Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a
thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and
hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one
isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry
Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the
answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations,
people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used
to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an
environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s
electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch
says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no
immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really
know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google,
therefore I am not.
Lynch thinks we are
frighteningly close to this point: blind to proof, no longer able to know.
After all, we’re already no longer able to agree about how to know.”
Where Computers Defeat Humans, and Where They Can’t By
ANDREW McAFEE and ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/opinion/where-computers-defeat-humans-and-where-they-cant.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/opinion/where-computers-defeat-humans-and-where-they-cant.html