Building in isolation dumb things that wreck the future instead of working with our sisters and brothers to make a better future aka Dude, you broke the future! by Charlie Stross
Pontifications
- tl;dr Building in isolation dumb things that wreck the future instead of working with our sisters and brothers to make a better future aka Dude, you broke the future! by Charlie Stross
- Relevant quote
QUOTE
Someone out there is working on it: a geolocation-aware social media scraping deep learning application, that uses a gamified, competitive interface to reward its "players" for joining in acts of mob violence against whoever the app developer hates. Probably it has an inoccuous-seeming but highly addictive training mode to get the users accustomed to working in teams and obeying the app's instructions—think Ingress or Pokemon Go. Then, at some pre-planned zero hour, it switches mode and starts rewarding players for violence—players who have been primed to think of their targets as vermin, by a steady drip-feed of micro-targeted dehumanizing propaganda delivered over a period of months.
And the worst bit of this picture?
Is that the app developer isn't a nation-state trying to disrupt its enemies, or an extremist political group trying to murder g*ys, j*ws, or m*slims; it's just a paperclip maximizer doing what it does—and you are the paper.
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