Category: @K12PlayGround

Must Watch The Social Dilemma | Official Trailer | Netflix

We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media?

As digital platforms increasingly become a lifeline to stay connected, Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.

If you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product. Social Media Platforms are an existential threat to humanity.

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https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224

https://Netflix.com/thesocialdilemma

ABOUT THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

The world has long recognized the positive applications of social media, from its role in empowering protesters to speak out against oppression during the Arab Spring uprisings almost a decade ago, to serving an instrumental role in fighting for equity and justice today. And in 2020, during an astonishing global pandemic, social media has become our lifeline to stay in touch with loved ones, as well as proving to be an asset for mobilizing civil rights protests. However, the system that connects us also invisibly controls us. The collective lack of understanding about how these platforms actually operate has led to hidden and often harmful consequences to society—consequences that are becoming more and more evident over time, and consequences that, the subjects in The Social Dilemma suggest, are an existential threat to humanity. The Social Dilemma is a powerful exploration of the disproportionate impact that a relatively small number of engineers in Silicon Valley have over the way we think, act, and live our lives. The film deftly tackles an underlying cause of our viral conspiracy theories, teenage mental health issues, rampant misinformation and political polarization, and makes these issues visceral, understandable, and urgent. Through a unique combination of documentary investigation and entertaining narrative drama, award-winning filmmakers Jeff Orlowski (Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral) and Larissa Rhodes (Chasing Coral) have once again exposed the invisible in a manner that is both enlightening and harrowing as they disrupt the disrupters by unveiling the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms. The film features compelling interviews with high-profile tech whistleblowers and innovation leaders including Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology; the co-inventor of the Facebook “Like” button, Justin Rosenstein; Tim Kendall, former President of Pinterest and former Director of Monetization at Facebook; Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction; Rashida Richardson, Director of Policy at the AI Now Institute, and many others. Demonstrating how social media affects consumers on a personal level, these fascinating insider insights are seamlessly woven into a captivating narrative, including Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men), that illuminates the very real consequences these seemingly innocent technologies can have on our everyday lives.

The Social Dilemma Lies spread 6x faster than the truth

The Social Dilemma Lies spread 6x faster than the truth

The Attention Economy – Internet Addiction – Social Media Addition.

People who can’t stop looking at their screen, their phone, their social media are also called “users”

People who are addicted to heroin are called users.

You are being Programmed, and do NOT realize it.
You are losing your ability to focus

Attention Engineers addict you and rip society apart.
You Will Wish You Watched This Before You Started Using Social Media

13 minutes

#DeleteFacebook

A Major Online Learning Platform Was Created by a Subterranean Religious ‘Cult’ Whose Leader Has Been Accused of Violence and Abuse

A Major Online Learning Platform Was Created by a Subterranean Religious ‘Cult’ Whose Leader Has Been Accused of Violence and Abuse

Acellus, a distance learning product used by thousands of students across the U.S., emerged from the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion

https://onezero.medium.com/a-major-online-learning-platform-was-created-by-a-subterranean-religious-cult-whose-leader-has-cec99e7adcaf

EXCLUSIVE:

and I are reporting the story of the religious “cult” connected to Acellus, an online education platform used by students across the nation. We uncovered accusations of physical + emotional abuse, unpaid labor, & child sexualization

Church of Jesus Christ in Zion

Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris on Big Tech’s antitrust hearing

Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris on Big Tech’s antitrust hearing

How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist

That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked. When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite. Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?

Tristan Harris was Google’s “Design Ethicist” where he studied how design choices directly affect people’s behavior in conscious and unconscious ways. He’s also a practicing magician! As he says, “Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it.” Over at Medium, Harris wrote a fascinating post about persuasive technology and how design can “exploit our minds’ weaknesses.”

Tristan Harris Google Design Ethicist The Social Dilemma Is Big Tech Too Big?

Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris on Big Tech’s antitrust hearing

Google will be reporting its second quarter earnings report tonight along with other Big Tech firms like Facebook, Amazon and Apple. This comes after Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified on Capitol Hill in an antitrust hearing. Tristan Harris, Center for Responsible Technology CEO and former Google design ethicist joins “Squawk on the Street” to discuss.

Former Google Design Ethicist: Relying on Big Tech in Schools Is a ‘Race to the Bottom’

“This is an arms race for attention,” says James Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides media reviews for schools, about the way big technology companies like Apple and Facebook have designed their products.

The doctors, researchers, policymakers and technologists that took the stage didn’t mince words in conveying that, if left unregulated, technology could pose an existential threat to society—and kids in particular.

“I see this as game over unless we change course,” says Tristan Harris, a former ethicist at Google who founded the Center for Humane Technology.

Tech Design Ethicist Works To Raise Awareness Of Internet Addiction

Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris explains how tech companies make their products hard to resist. He now advocates for a Hippocratic Oath for tech designers. So here’s the thing. When you think about Internet addiction, tech companies actually want people, not just teenagers, to spend time on their apps and their devices. And while that doesn’t always lead to addiction, it does become a habit, sometimes an unhealthy one for many people.

A Former Google Design Ethicist on Tech Taking Over Minds

“They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose. I can’t emphasize enough how deep this insight is…. When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:

‘what’s not on the menu?’
‘why am I being given these options and not others?’
‘do I know the menu provider’s goals?’
‘is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?’”

The Ethical Dilemma at the Heart of Big Tech Companies

To find out, we  — along with co-author of the study, danah boyd (who prefers lowercase letters in her name) — studied those doing the work of ethics inside of companies, whom we call “ethics owners,” to find out what they see as their task at hand.  “Owner” is common parlance inside of flat corporate structures, meaning someone who is responsible for coordinating a domain of work across the different units of an organization. Our research interviewing this new class of tech industry professionals shows that their work is, tentatively and haltingly, becoming more concrete through both an attention to process and a concern with outcomes.

The problem with AI ethics

Is Big Tech’s embrace of AI ethics boards actually helping anyone?

Researchers from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and top universities objected to the board’s inclusion of Kay Coles James, the president of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation. They pointed out that James and her organization campaign against anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ groups and sponsor climate change denial, making her unfit to offer ethical advice to the world’s most powerful AI company. An open petition demanding James’ removal was launched (it currently has more than 1,700 signatures), and as part of the backlash, one member of the newly formed board resigned.
Google has yet to say anything about all of this (it didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Verge), but to many in the AI community, it’s a clear example of Big Tech’s inability to deal honestly and openly with the ethics of its work.