How 'Rest of World' Wants to Change International Tech Coverage (medium.com) 19
Medium's tech site OneZero reports on "Rest of World" [dot org], which they call "a news site dedicated to telling technology stories about what's happening outside of North America and Europe," but founded as a nonprofit by the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
Sophie Schmidt: We have big intractable problems in the tech and society category: misinformation, disinformation, surveillance, privacy, you name it. We're creating panels, and commissions, and we're shaking our fists at big platforms and saying, "Please fix it." And it feels a little bit helpless. But the thing that's not coming up is that every other country in the world is also dealing with it in slightly different ways.
What if the solutions to our problems lie in the sharing of those experiences, and ideas, and learnings? Expanding the dataset. It's honestly baffling. We have billions of people in the world all using technology all the time. I think the last data I saw said there's almost 5 billion people online. And depending on how you count Western versus non-Western, something like 80% of all humans live outside of the Western bubble. That means that you have almost an infinite number of parallel experiments, playing out simultaneously all around us just outside of you. So, why aren't we comparing experiences...?
Some of the interview's highlights:
What if the solutions to our problems lie in the sharing of those experiences, and ideas, and learnings? Expanding the dataset. It's honestly baffling. We have billions of people in the world all using technology all the time. I think the last data I saw said there's almost 5 billion people online. And depending on how you count Western versus non-Western, something like 80% of all humans live outside of the Western bubble. That means that you have almost an infinite number of parallel experiments, playing out simultaneously all around us just outside of you. So, why aren't we comparing experiences...?
Some of the interview's highlights:
- On the topic of emotion recognition software, a Rest of World senior editor points out "it's basically junk science. It's not based on any fundamental facts about human behavior... There's a lot of companies across China who are trying to use this faulty science for a number of different applications."
- The senior editor argues that our conception of the social credit score in China was off. "Some of the Chinese researchers I talked to were like, 'We got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it.'"
- The senior editor agrees Clubhouse might change the way that politics works globally. "But I think the second option, which we're already seeing glimmers of, is that it's going to get banned in more places. And the places where it doesn't get banned, it's going to be very closely surveilled."
- Schmidt is proud of their follow-up on OKash, an African mobile-lending company partially owned by Opera that was accused of predatory loans through Android apps. "We did some digging and the Filipino SEC had banned, I think, 24 similar types of apps just a few months before that. And those ones were inspired by something that came out of China.
"...the things that can happen outside of regulated environments tell us what the limits of tech are. They tell us what tech can be."
Social Credit Score (Score:4, Funny)
'We got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it.'
We developed the first nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean we think they are a nifty thing for everyone to use.
Re: (Score:3)
SCS aka moderation writ large.
Re:Social Credit Score (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the inspiration for N4zi ideology also came from the US, especially Henry Ford's antisemitism.
And similarly, China likely caused the US to veer away from some terrible ideas (for now) simply by taking them one step further and showing what a dark path they lead to.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Nazis and US were so much similar people have no idea.
The Nazi salute? It came from "flag salute" in US public schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Removing lesser races? Eugenics was hot in the US. In fact, they had started forcible sterilization of black women: http://eugenicsarchive.ca/disc... [eugenicsarchive.ca]
Hitler Youth were spending holidays with Boy Scouts was a thing: https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/... [sundaypost.com]
And do not forget the infamous Time cover proclaiming Hitler as the "man of the year, 1938": http://content [time.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The "nazi salut" is actually an old roman salut.
And Hitler probably picked it up from Italy as Mussolini had introduced it in his armed forces long before Hitler was even in power.
Interesting links!!
We got idea from you. Why you so upset? (Score:4, Informative)
Nazis said the exact same thing a while back! [history.com]
In 1935, Nazi Germany passed two radically discriminatory pieces of legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.
Together, these were known as the Nuremberg Laws, and they laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust and World War II.
When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren't just coming up with ideas out of thin air.
They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler's American Model, that country was the United States.
"America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world," says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School.
"Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law."
In particular, Nazis admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against Black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.
Re: (Score:1)
Supersized coverage. (Score:3)
So basically an oversized Stackexchange [youtu.be].
Reality america's dysfunctional government... (Score:4, Informative)
... has given birth to a lawless society where corporations run roughshod over everyone. Since america's congress is beholden to their paymasters, I'm not expecting anything to change.
The last 23 years so american copyright law has supercharged software companies abilities to hack our PC's and steal software on industrial level scales. Client back ending software (aka spliting programs into two chunks running them mainframe dumb client) is the same as stealing software, but it's A-OK with america's bankrupt one sided IP laws where software is licensed not owned, so it's ok to sell people incomplete applications or games with missing networking code. That is the shit that gave birth to steam/uplay/mmo's and now client-server backended windows 10 where Microsoft remotely controls your PC and is seeking to lock it down with trusted computing.
Legacy of the public buying incomplete software divided into two sets of files - mmo's/steam/uplay/origin/rockstar social club/etc.
https://support.activision.com... [activision.com]
For those of you who don't know what trusted computing is, Trusted computing faq:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja1... [cam.ac.uk]
Either way I expect UWP to slowly phase out win 32 and our apps to get the ability to be remotely shut down by windows update.
Misinformation. (Score:3, Insightful)
'We got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it.'
Yeah, no. This guy either doesn't know what he's talking about or is straight up lying.
We do NOT punish people via credit scores for wanting a different party to be in power. We do NOT prohibit travel based on credit score.
Re:Misinformation. (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.thelastamericanvag... [thelastame...gabond.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We do NOT punish people via credit scores for wanting a different party to be in power.
Not via credit scores ...
We do NOT prohibit travel based on credit score.
Yet.
Yep, the Chinese example is definitely a warning.
Re:Misinformation - no-fly lists... (Score:3)
Instead we have secretive no-fly lists, with no way to know when or how you get on one, or how to get off it, often based on rumor, social "information", and other innuendo, with even less accountability....
Re: Misinformation. (Score:4)
We do NOT punish people via credit scores for wanting a different party to be in power.
Maybe not via credit score, but people certainly get themselves fired and have contracts canceled for their politics.
Re: (Score:3)
Or he's dividing his categories differently from the way you do. I can see ways of categorizing things so that "social score" is an amalgam of several threads present in the US. It's not the way I normally think of things, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Consider that "social score" might be considered analogous to the puritan notion of righteousness being reflected in worldly success. Of course you need to combine that with several other things to get the Chinese "social score". The "
Re: (Score:3)
What? The whole idea of the social credit score is to apply it broadly, based on data from a lot of different sources, so that it has lots of details about all the citizens it rates and can be used across many areas of society. That is enormously different from Red Hat and RMS, where they looked at one particular person exactly because of his prominence and made a fact- and industry-specific decision about how to respond. The "with a computer" angle is almost the key idea. It's at least the major discri
Interview "highlights" (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, what a dumpster fire of an interview. Neither the senior editor nor Sophie Schmidt have any idea what they are talking about. I'm actually a bit embarrassed on their behalf. The so-called highlights:
On the topic of emotion recognition software, a Rest of World senior editor points out "it's basically junk science. It's not based on any fundamental facts about human behavior... There's a lot of companies across China who are trying to use this faulty science for a number of different applications."
Emotion recognition isn't junk science. Hint: if you can tell whether people are happy or mad by looking at or listening to them, then a computer will be able to as well. Here's a list of some of the peer reviewed actual science: https://scholar.google.com/sch... [google.com]
So what if China is trying to use it in different applications. That's called innovation, and it is what you do when you are trying to find the limits of a new technology.
The senior editor argues that our conception of the social credit score in China was off. "Some of the Chinese researchers I talked to were like, 'We got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it.'"
No, our conception of the Chinese social credit score isn't off. The idea of a big brother government keeping track of individual's behaviours goes directly against the three pillars of liberty, fraternity, and equality that western society is built upon. I'm happy to dump anyone who argues otherwise into the authoritarian country of their choice.
The senior editor agrees Clubhouse might change the way that politics works globally. "But I think the second option, which we're already seeing glimmers of, is that it's going to get banned in more places. And the places where it doesn't get banned, it's going to be very closely surveilled."
No, clubhouse won't change the way politics works. All that happened was that a few particularly dumb politicians briefly forgot that they aren't capable of dealing with questions that their staff haven't vetted. They won't make that mistake twice. In the future, politicians will only engage with platforms where they have control of what they are about to get asked. No country will bother to ban Clubhouse, and the'll only track it to the extent that it will bolster existing polling.
Schmidt is proud of their follow-up on OKash, an African mobile-lending company partially owned by Opera that was accused of predatory loans through Android apps. "We did some digging and the Filipino SEC had banned, I think, 24 similar types of apps just a few months before that. And those ones were inspired by something that came out of China.
Except that their followup did nothing. The story was broken by other people, and various governments dealt with similar types of apps long before "Rest of World" published anything to do with this story. The impact of "Rest of World" on this was zero, so I have no idea why Schmidt would be proud.
Shame on you slashdot for giving publicity to these fools.