Wednesday, 27 September 2023
AI: good and bad
Media have recently been full of the laetest news about artificial humanoid capacities like natural (better called natural seeming) language.Yes AI can do some things like humans and sometimes bettter than. But there is a social upside to the dangers: if machines canb do it there is nothing so remarkable about human intellectual skills which have often been the basis for aggression and injusstice. These skills can be analysed and programmed in to "dead" matter.If machines can do it, psople shouldn't be so superior about it. So, surprise, surprise, AI can make us more humble and contribute to a world based on human humility and solidarity.
Social media challenge state powers but the Better can still prevail on the Web
Generating revenue when each of the potential billion clicks could generate at least $1 in advertising revenue is not so difficult. The result is that unaccoutable actors like Meta (formerly Facebook) generate enotmous wealth and the assocaited power to challenge increasingly anxious mid-sized economies like Canada's,. For anybody to pose this as a choice between "meta" and the availability of news about Canada plays in to the ambitions of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (who never outgrew his bigger is better adolescence).That good things can and do happpen on Facebook should remind us that progressive values can domesticate the Web just as well as bad actors. After all, that was the original vision of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.Time for progressive actors to take back the Web as nature's instrument for acatching bothersome insects. Check this link for late World Widw Web news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay7GSLX9tHM
Congrats to Karma Food Coop
Tuesday, 29 August 2023
"Liquid reality" is drone delievered
Progressive social thinker Zygmunt Bauman coined the valuable phrase "liquid reality” to describe the mobile anonymity of much in today’s commercialized societies that was once considered definingly personal. If there was ever any honour in military death drone warfare signals its final disposal, Just as coin payment is now routinely ridiculed armed combat becomes old-fashoned and primitive when you can kill remotely. As cash payment requiring physical exchage is outlawed major social processes become more and more impersoonal. If death and money become more abstract social values become even more important for us to safeguard and practice.
Wednesday, 23 August 2023
Eric La Fleche - who is he and why is he smiling?
It's Eric Richer [this is not a joke - it's his middle name] LaFleche, meaning arrow in French [also not a joke] who is CEO of Metro Supermarket chain.For not doing very much he was paid $215.000 in 2022, according to the Financial Post. It's a lot more than striking Metro workers, many on minimum wage, are asking for. The Financial Post has named him oustanding CEO of the year because his geocery chain last year raised $16 billion in revenue..