If you’re a “bad” person, logically your technology should help you be bad.
And if you’re good, the same.
But never would I want my technology to inform me what is good or bad, or permit me one path over the other. That is my decision as the human in the relationship.
Neutrality is a myth. Actively promoting values and challenging biases is preferable. You don't have to agree with the values promoted, and you're welcome to choose not to use the technology.
It is that simple.
Technology is built in service to mankind.
> For subjects to believe in an ideology, it must have been presented to them, and been accepted, as non-ideological indeed, as True and Right, and what anyone sensible would believe. As we shall see in 2e, Žižek is alert to the realist insight that there is no more effective political gesture than to declare some contestable matter above political contestation. Just as the third way is said to be post-ideological or national security is claimed to be extra-political, so Žižek argues that ideologies are always presented by their proponents as being discourses about Things too sacred to profane by politics. Hence, Žižek’s bold opening in The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has not so much disappeared from the political landscape as come into its own. It is exactly because of this success, Žižek argues, that ideology has also been able to be dismissed in accepted political and theoretical opinion.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/#Ha
I think it's actually fairly concerning that the fault lines between ideologies seems to be deepening - people seemed more and more convinced that their positions are absolutely not even contestable. I'm not sure where there is room for civil political discourse and positive change in this kind of scenario.
That thought process is absolutely poisonous for technology - it’s like a viral brain-lock.
I mean tech is never neutral right?
Search for abortion resources, search for 3D printing a firearm, search for pirated movies, search for being anonymous in a protest... all get redirected to the right way to think of things.
The FBI should just go ahead and ask them for the good of the people to redirect all terms they categorize as terroristic in nature to their anti radicalization resources...
Also: you can very easily find hate groups and where they hang out on the internet through Google. You'll also, correctly, find adequate warning that these groups are probably not places you want to be.
The key word here is not "bad" but "your". Whose technology is Siri?
I think this oversteps the Silicon Valley idea that technology is always inherently beneficial.
It's really not unfair that I can buy gardening gloves and radish seeds on Amazon, while a domestic terrorist has to sneak around and lie to buy a barrel of nitromethane. We should not be using our technology to enable both equally, and then leave it to the individual to decide whether to plant a garden or a bomb.
> And if you’re good, the same.
That is almost tautologically the case of how technology works, but Siri isn’t your technology (where you = the end user), it is Apple’s.
With apologies to Godwin, but IBM and the Holocaust [1] will always be relevant in these discussions.
What thugs are the social, political and business elites supporting today?
There's a world of difference between exploring the world of information and genocide.
When entities like Apple start doing things like this is it pouring gasoline on conspiracy theory fires, and one can argue makes things worse.
It's also a classic case of the Streisand Effect.
What if google were making these editorial decisions during WWII? Would you be redirected away from things supportive Japanese Americans that were place in internment camps?
How about during the red scare? Would you be directed to Hollywood blacklists?
How about during the civil rights era? Would you be directed to content arguing in favor of segregation?
Contrary to popular liberal belief, the Black community in America is not a borg with one hive mind. There's a lot of diversity of thought within that community and people that dissent from the very narrow viewpoint that many gatekeepers who lean left are promoting. There's a lot more thoughtfulness and nuance in discussion than promoting one-sided activism would suggest. In fact, this active filtering robs that community (and other communities that are filtered) of their agency.
Here's a list of people from the black community with dissenting opinions that I can name quickly off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many many more:
Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Roland G. Fryer Jr. Anthony Mackey, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Larry Sharpe, Pastor Corey Brooks, Eric July
It’s almost like they can’t imagine a scenario where they are the minority, and might wish to pursue their own beliefs in peace...
Especially shameful here on HN, which claims to be an especially intellectually open-minded community!
For shame, that you present an accurate, supported analysis of risks that doesn’t support the current dogma! ;)
The last few years definitely have had a feeling of eternal september and of all the eternal septembers I've experienced in my 26 years on the Internet, this is by far the worst and most toxic to open, thoughtful and nuanced discussion.
My general observation is that those that best recognize the importance of such liberties also possess the greatest faculties in abstraction (a fundamental skill for success in engineering, especially software engineering). For it is only through abstraction that someone is able to back out from the concrete issue at hand and see generalizable principles and how they might apply to other issues under other circumstances.
My suspicion is that as HN and tech in general has caught the attention of a broader audience, that the median capacity to abstract has dropped and a plurality lacks the comparable capacity to reason abstractly as once existed on HN.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-...
This would aggregate people for whom downvote means “I don’t agree”, and separately those whose downvote means “that’s an inflammatory/ unsupported/ insane position”.
Soon, those open to reasoned debate would see comments by others known for reasoned debate — regardless of their political/ideological stripe.
The trolls would be relegated each to their own echo-chamber.
Everybody wins!