Just watched a wonderful example of Orwellian Double Speak in an interview with the Facebook CEO in Munich this past February.

He said that Facebook is to give people a voice and encourage democratic dialogue and bring people together. How? Hive behaviour and groupthink?

Then he says that Facebook takes down one million fake accounts per day and regulation is necessary. Of course, nobody asks who determines what is fake. Read about Stanley Milgram’s study on obedience to authority to understand why.

Artificial Intelligence determines if a website is not behaving like a human and that’s why Facebook just had to intervene in over 200 elections worldwide since 2016. Great. So a robot will determine authentic behaviour – like HAL in the movie 2001.

So if the robot makes a mistake about your intentions, can you sue them in court?

The NYSE is eliminating floor traders starting tomorrow because of the virus and all the trades will be done by robots. A few days ago I found an article that said that AI trades are great when markets are going up, but the robots flee when markets start trading down and things crash. This article is now nowhere to be found on the internet.

The algorithm made me do it.

https://www.mathwashing.com

Sometimes it breaks down and you need repairs.

It is fixed now.

And thanks to Mostafa, it has some important upgrades to make it run even better.

Thanks for your patience.

My blog had some internal problems that I hope are now fixed. This is the test to see if it works.

This is one person’s opinion that I read, but I can’t remember who wrote it:

“It turns out that a “smart home” is an incredibly stupid idea. If you can’t even open your front door without getting permission from a remotely processed Google login procedure that requires the smooth functioning of routers, servers and the power grid, you’ve put yourself in a stupid situation. Do you really want Google — now the most evil corporation in the world — to control your access to your own home? Do you even want Google knowing when you’re entering and leaving your home?”

(But first, a correction about yesterdays post. My point was based on images of garbage. You had to click on the green highlighted word “mad”, which most people missed. I will make my links clearer in the future.)

I can’t remember what website I found this on, but it is good information. And maybe the consequences are something you hadn’t thought of.

“An anonymous reader quotes this opinion piece by former derivatives broker Brett Scott: Banks are closing ATMs and branches in an attempt to ‘nudge’ users towards digital services — and it’s all for their own benefit… I recently got a letter from my bank telling me that they are shutting down local branches because “customers are turning to digital”, and they are thus “responding to changing customer preferences”. I am one of the customers they are referring to, but I never asked them to shut down the branches… I am much more likely to “choose” a digital option if the banks deliberately make it harder for me to choose a non-digital option. In behavioral economics this is referred to as “nudging”. If a powerful institution wants to make people choose a certain thing, the best strategy is to make it difficult to choose the alternative…

“Digital systems may be “convenient”, but they often come with central points of failure. Cash, on the other hand, does not crash. It does not rely on external data centres and is not subject to remote control or remote monitoring. The cash system allows for an unmonitored “off the grid” space. This is also the reason why financial institutions and financial technology companies want to get rid of it. Cash transactions are outside the net that such institutions cast to harvest fees and data.”

“A cashless society brings dangers. People without bank accounts will find themselves further marginalized, disenfranchised from the cash infrastructure that previously supported them. There are also poorly understood psychological implications about cash encouraging self-control while paying by card or a mobile phone can encourage spending. And a cashless society has major surveillance implications.
While a cashless society might make it cheaper to run a bank, “A cashless society is not in your interest…” argues the author.”

“We must recognize every cash machine that is shut down as another step in financial institutions’ campaign to nudge you into their digital enclosures.”

Cash is freedom. Cashless is another step in the direction of too much control over your life.

There is a lot of controversy about the rollout of 5G. It is either “the stupidest idea in the history of the world” according to a biochem professor, or an awesome way to load web pages in a millisecond, or a Skynet killing machine right out of The Terminator. Who knows?

There is a story out of the Netherlands claiming an experiment with 5G apparently ended in the death of hundreds of birds. But then Snopes.com says that is false and they never lie.

It’s not like there has ever been anything that we were told was safe, and then things went horribly wrong. Except maybe the company who had several Nazi war criminals on staff when they created the wonder drug Thalidomide.

And Vioxx, Olestra, Agent Orange, Round Up, GMO food, etc., etc., etc., etc.

The Omit Then Deny strategy works perfectly. Don’t conduct certain tests, and then free yourself from evidence that would limit your market share.

Maybe. Maybe Not.

We’re all guinea pigs now. But who cares. The stock market goes up and apparently, that’s all that matters. Eat, Drink and Be Merry.

Even though I’ve never seen a reality show (we got rid of cable TV over 10 years ago), I have an idea for a new one. It would be called Last Sane Person Standing.

The contestants would be assessed by how many meds they are on and how close they live to a psych hospital. Their talent would be conspiracy theory beliefs, and the judges would award points on how convincing and sincere they are.

Will the Spirit Cooking Dinner with Marina Abramovic take home the prize? Or David Icke and the Lizard People? Or maybe 911 Was An Inside Job will win.

The judges would have the power to determine, not only the contestant’s talent or lack thereof, but their sanity. The incoherence of calling the winner sane would be the ultimate power trip of insult and humiliation. And if you really think about it, that’s pretty much what they do.

https://studymoose.com/reality-tv-creative-or-cruel-essay

The World Economic Forum holds an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In a recent article by Kevin Roose, he says that in public, many executives were wringing their hands about the fate of workers due to the negative consequences of automation. But in private, they admitted they are quietly racing to replace workers. (Cue image of Grinch lying to Cindy Lou Who).

The U.N. decided last December in Marrakech that migration is now a human right. Trudeau signed on. So mass migration and declining jobs – that’s quite a recipe – for what I’m not quite sure, but I could guess.

Don’t worry, once the robots take over, we’ll have plenty of time to pursue endless leisure activities like reading books and visiting museums. Except we won’t have any money and we’ll be living in the street because we don’t have a job. Oh, but wait, robots don’t pay taxes so there won’t be any extra money for libraries or museums.

If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm or downloaded, you might stand a chance of survival.

While most sectors will experience a slowdown, this will free up workers to focus on other tasks – like looking for a job or fleeing robots.

With the new and improved addiction capabilities, you too can join the hallowed halls of addicts.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” admitted Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, to an audience of Stanford students. He was responding to a question about his involvement in exploiting consumer behavior. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he explained. In Palihapitiya’s talk, he highlighted something most of us know but few really appreciate: smartphones and the social media platforms they support are turning us into bona fide addicts. While it’s easy to dismiss this claim as hyperbole, platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram leverage the very same neural circuitry used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us using their products as much as possible. Taking a closer look at the underlying science may give you pause the next time you feel your pocket buzz.”

While I wait for the information age to end, and since I have never used Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or any other tool of the distractosphere, I have decided to leave my brain to science. I expect it will be put on display in a museum, next to the dinosaur exhibit and the mummified Mennonite as a relic to be worshipped by Luddites.

If you are curious about what the Internet is doing to our brains, you might enjoy this.