Adrian Buck’s Reviews > New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future > Status Update

"To expose children to this content is abuse....it's not about intention, but about a kind a violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives" - it's actually about thrill seeking adolescents and inattentive parents.

If you're searching for support for your views online, you find it. And moreover, you will fed a constant stream of validation...this is algorithmic radicalisaton" - yes, but its an unintended consequence of the algorithm. It is hard to think of any technology that didn't have unintended consequences.

"One of the first symptoms of clinical paranoia is the belief that somebody is watching you; but this belief is now a reasonable one. Every email we send..." - at best we can say someone can access our digital footprint, not that someone is doing it in realtime.

"It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditons of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced." - our agency is not reduced, our increased vision enables us to see how limited our agency always was.

"It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditons of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced." - our agency is not reduced, our increased vision enables us to see how limited our agency always was.

"It became clear that the international nature of the internet that there was no possible restriction on its surveillance, no objection to governments spying upon their own citizens, everyone was a foreigner to someone, and once the data was collected it went into the pot" - hence the popularity of Huawei with the Hungarian and British government.

"Cooperation between human and machine turns out to be a more potent strategy than the most powerful computer alone." - and needless to say at this point, more potent than the most powerful human player alone. Cooperation then is the future?

"every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recogniser goes up." - they were probably Chomskyites.

"Examples of encoded biases are easy to come by..." - it's the unencoded biases that worry me. But this compedium of techno-anxiety approach weakens the impact of these arguments.

"Despite increasingly sophisticated systems of both computation and visualisation, we are no closer today to understanding exactly how machine learning does what it does; we can only adjudicate the results.' - ok, if true, this is quite scary.