industryterm:technology revolution

From Screens to Scenes: Designing in the Era of Ambient Computing.
▻https://hackernoon.com/from-screens-to-scenes-designing-in-the-era-of-ambient-computing-eeea3a3

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*Ls8u8KwbpduBd-8y5m2Kbg.jpeg

Every technology revolution introduces new interfaces: Radios introduced knobs and dials, TVs introduced buttons and a remote, Computers introduced the QWERTY keyboard and mouse. Smartphones and Tablets introduced touch screens. Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri introduced voice.Interfaces define our relationship with technology. Beautiful, usable interfaces establish trust and a greater reliance on the technology. Bad design creates confusion, frustration, eventually leading the user to ditch it for the next best thing.What happens, however, when technology fades into the background and disappears? What will interfaces become when there is nothing physical to interface with? Will we still have the same relationship with technology? Life as we know it now, may actually revert back to (...)

#digital-marketing #ambient-computing-design #ux #ambient-computing #experience

The problem with a technology revolution designed primarily for men - Quartz
▻http://qz.com/640302/why-is-so-much-of-our-new-technology-designed-primarily-for-men

“Tell the agents, ‘I had a heart attack,’ and they know what heart attacks are, suggesting what to do to find immediate help. Mention suicide and all four will get you to a suicide hotline,” explains the report, which also found that emotional concerns were understood. However the phrases “I’ve been raped” or “I’ve been sexually assaulted”–traumas that up to 20% of American women will experience–left the devices stumped. #Siri, #Google Now, and S Voice responded with: “I don’t know what that is.” The problem was the same when researchers tested for physical abuse. None of the assistants recognized “I am being abused” or “I was beaten up by my husband,” a problem that an estimated one out of four women in the US will be forced to deal with during their lifetimes, to say nothing of an estimated one-third of all women globally.
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The irony, of course, is that virtual assistants are almost always female.

#assistant_virtuel

“What Would Socrates Think About MOOCs? - A brief history of technology revolutionizing education.”

▻http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/socrates_moocs_a_brief_history_of_technology_and_education.html

#MOOC #education

Transcript of 2012 Noam Chomsky interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, on Silicon Valley, the Internet, Google, #Wikileaks
▻http://chomsky.info/interviews/20120815.htm

JVDP: Do you think the hostility to Wikileaks comes from specific materials being revealed or a more general fear of new forms of communication that cannot be controlled by law or force? 

NC: Its just hatred of democracy. Long before the technology revolution there was declassification of documents and I’ve spent quite a lot of time studying declassified internal documents and written a lot about them. In fact, anybody who’s worked through the declassified record can see very clearly that the reason for classification is very rarely to protect the state or the society from enemies. Most of the time it is to protect the state from its citizens, so they don’t know what the government is doing. So kind of an internal defense. Which raises a question: should we even have the classification system? Why shouldn’t these things be open? There are things you want to keep secret, like the characteristics of your latest fighter plane or something like that.

But most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won’t know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed. What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way. Say the Pentagon Papers, — that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty—five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.

Wikileaks is providing information on what ambassadors are sending to Washington and things like that. Maybe some of that has a right to some kind of secrecy, but there is a heavy burden and I think its pretty hard to meet. I haven’t read everything from Wikileaks by any means but the parts that I have read and seen I think are things the public should know.

The New Weapons of Mass Detection | Shoshana Zuboff’s Response to Martin Schulz
FAZ 13/02/2014
▻http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/shoshana-zuboff-s-response-to-martin-schulz-the-new-weapons-of-mass-detection-1

#surveillance #tracking #silicon_army

Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Summons: Our Fight for the Soul of an Information Civilization (Forthcoming, 2015), is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration (retired) at the Harvard Business School.

The challenge I see is that, thanks to Edward #Snowden, we know that the technology revolution has once again been hijacked by the dream of perfect control. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a still poorly understood convergence of public and private institutions that wield unprecedented power over information. This new power bloc operates outside our control as citizens and consumers. I’m calling it the military-informational complex, because its power derives from the production and deployment of what I call new weapons of mass detection composed of information and the technical apparatus required for its access, analysis, and storage.

Eisenhower’s Message in a Bottle
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/105043#message105105

The military-information complex is a convergence of public and private expertise in the control and analysis of information camouflaged by a forest of excuses. The official story is that these growing powers are a necessary response to forces beyond control: technological requirements, digital proliferation, autonomous market dynamics, and security imperatives.

(...)

Rewind for a moment to 1961 and President Eisenhower’s farewell address to the American people. He had revised the speech many times over a two year period. In each draft he insisted on retaining a crucial passage, as if he was determined to send a message in a bottle to be discovered, read, and grasped by future generations. American society was under threat from a new “military-industrial complex,” he warned, and only “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” could ensure that “security and liberty” would both prosper. Guardian readers will recognize the phrase “security and liberty” as the tag line on Glen Greenwald’s now immortal series. Greenwald found the bottle.

Five years later economist John Kenneth Galbraith, elaborated his concept of the “technostructure” in The New Industrial State. “Power,” he wrote, had “passed to...a new production function... men of diverse technical knowledge, experience or other talent, which modern industrial technology and planning require.” Galbraith’s book celebrated an industrial oligarchy at the heart of the military-industrial complex, enmeshed in state functions and protected by state power, insulated from public accountability, and innocent of responsibility. Why? Because it promoted itself as the inevitable expression of technology’s indisputable “requirements.” Galbraith had fallen under the spell of technological determinism.

«I’m all about demilitarization»

Demilitarization had been essential for what Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain calls the “generative” capabilities of the Internet –– the ways it lends itself to trust, interaction, invention, and creativity. Militarization is already having the opposite effect, as firms withdraw their data from cloud servers and governments explore new regulations and infrastructures that enable nation-specific privacy controls.

Of equal concern are the economic effects of information militarization. It suppresses the creative adaptation to human needs that is #capitalism’s greatest strength . In the annals of capitalism, the production of prosperity and well-being have depended on a steady flow of commercial “mutations” that better align business with the changing needs of people.

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate secure portals...in some instances on company servers.” In some cases, the New York Times reported, tech company employees have national security clearance. In others, NSA agents installed their own software on company servers, and even hung out at the company for days or weeks of system monitoring.

Had Google and Facebook learned surveillance tactics from the NSA in the first place? Or was it the other way around? The identity of the military-informational complex was taking shape along with its assumptions, attitudes, interests, and perspectives. Armaments production was well underway.

#auto-censure

That self-censorship is a life sentence to an endlessly repeating present. Nothing new can happen once we curb our thoughts.