Metaviews

It’s clear that privacy is essential, but protecting our privacy can be legitimately confusing.
What if instead of fighting fire with fire we starting using water.
What if predictive privacy was the kind of water necessary to put out the fire that is contemporary surveillance based AI?

As part of our ongoing work building the Automated Media Network, we’ve been researching GPT-3 based applications and services. In so doing, it has been an interesting exercise both in the biases embedded into GPT-3, as well as the biases reflected in how the companies are choosing to use this technology.

The pandemic has empowered professionals to pursue a balance between life and work, leading many to move out of major cities to find refuge in rural communities. What does this shift mean for the future of work and the role of super cities?

In yesterday’s issue we looked at the twenty year projections prepared by the US intelligence community for the incoming Biden administration. In particular highlighting the political nature of these trend reports, that they also act as road maps to desired futures.

This past weekend the province of Ontario entered a crisis that combined an escalating pandemic with an increasingly fed up public. Fed up, not just with the pandemic, but the utter incompetence of our leadership.

The mythology of technology is powerful, but also kind of superficial. It usually doesn’t take much to move past the marketing and vapour ware to understand whether a tool is useful or not. With AI this has been a bit more challenging, as the opaqueness of the tech often makes it difficult for us to scrutinize or understand what is taking place behind the scenes. Similarly the language and hype around AI deliberately hides or downplays the role of humans in making these automated systems work.