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One of the great pioneers of AI, Joseph Weizenbaum, foresaw some of this: Here's a quote from an interview [1]: " if it had not been for the computer...they [t
by sn41 8y ago
One of the great pioneers of AI, Joseph Weizenbaum, foresaw some of this: Here's a quote from an interview [1]:
" if it had not been for the computer...they [the banks] might have had to decentralize, or they might have had to reorganize in some way. ... What the coming of the computer did, "just-in-time" was to make it unnecessary to change the system in any way. So the computer has acted as fundamentally a conservative force, a force which kept power or even solidified power where it already existed."
But I think there is also the Web 2.0 "echo chamber" effect, or positive feedback effect, based on the filter bubbles, and customised news. We tend to hear only from people who have the same views. Moreover, opinions are getting amplified, and you get ignored unless you make extreme, polarising and clickbait comments. Only such comments are "upvoted". I have disabled Disqus, Vuukle, and other comment-based services available on most news websites by redirecting all of these to localhost in my /etc/hosts file. Reading news feels less disturbing now.
[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
- antidesitter 8y agoWhy would banks have had to decentralize, if not for the computer? The given reason sounds like a non-sequitur to me: > Consider that, say 20, 25 years ago, the banks were faced with the fact that the population was growing at a very rapid rate, many more checks would be written than before, and so on. How does this imply decentralization would be necessary? Banks would just scale up their infrastructure and workforce, like any other institution over the course of humanity’s history of population growth.