EOTO reax

What I learned...

The use of birds as messengers has been established thousands of years ago.  The ancient city of Rome used homing pigeons to let people know the winner of the Ancient Olympics. They would paint the bird the color of the team that the winner belonged to.  These birds were critical in wars like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Civil War. and even World War I.  The idea of carrier pigeons came from pigeons' innate instinct to return home, no matter the conditions or distance traveled. They possess "compass sense" and "map sense." These senses made them the perfect messengers. Egypt also used carrier pigeons carriers in 3000 BC.  Historically these birds only flew one way. But. people began to put their food at one location and their homes at another.  Historically. the first noted example of this is when Noah sent a dove to go check and see if it was dry enough to emerge from the ark. And the dove brought back a branch as a sign of life after the Flood. In WWI. the presiding officers sent carrier pigeons between Bluefields to check on each battle's status and send messages based on the present circumstances of the battle.

The Overton window of political possibility is the range of ideas the public is willing to consider and accept  Model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics  Created by Joseph Overton in the mid-1990s who was senior V.P. of Mackinac Center for Public Policy Politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support generally, only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options (policies that lie inside the Overton Window) politicians risk losing popular support if they champion other ideas that lie outside the Overton Window Politicians can move the Overton Window by endorsing a policy lying outside the window, but this is rare More often, the window moves based on the slow evolution of societal values and norms If politicians must locate the window, think tanks and social movements must shift it; must convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it In the United States, the idea of: Different races mixing in public, Gay marriage, and women's suffrage were once considered extreme policies. The fact that they're now deemed common sense, reflects progress in shifting the Overton window.

Diffusion of Innovations

The theory of the diffusion of innovations holds that new technological and other advancements spread throughout societies and cultures from their introduction to widespread adoption. The diffusion of innovations theory tries to explain how and why new ideas and practices are adopted over long periods. How innovations are communicated to various segments of society and the subjective opinions associated with the innovations both have a significant impact on how quickly they spread. It is essential to comprehend this theory when expanding market share because it is frequently used in product marketing. E.M. Rogers, a communication theorist at the University of New Mexico, developed the theory in 1962. To explain the stages of idea adoption by various actors, it incorporates previous sociological theories of behavioral change. The primary individuals, according to the theory of innovation diffusion, are:

- Innovators: people who are the first to try new ideas and are willing to take risks.

- Early Adopters: are individuals who wish to test cutting-edge technologies in order to evaluate their impact on society.

- Early Majority: members of the general public who set the standard for how innovation is used in mainstream society.

- Late Majority: People who adhere to the early majority and incorporate innovation into their daily lives make up another segment of the general population.

- Laggards: individuals who adopt novel products and ideas later than most people. This is primarily due to their fixed perspective and fear of risk. If innovation is not encouraged, mainstream society will eventually lose its ability to function normally. They are compelled to use it as a result.

The application of the diffusion theory results in the success of numerous campaigns and goods. The iPhone and Apple are one of the most straightforward and effective applications of this theory. Because it was so innovative and cutting-edge, the Apple team had no idea that the iPhone would one day alter history. The iPhone's widespread adoption can be broken down using the five-step adoption model and diffusion theory adopter categories. Because they were among the first to adopt this revolutionary new smartphone concept, the designers of the iPhone were innovators. These are the people who set up camp outside the Apple store whenever a new version is released. The early majority eventually purchased an iPhone after hearing about it from peers and influential members of their social groups. As a result, they became role models for the majority of the latecomers, encouraging them to buy smartphones because they are essential to maintaining social status. Everyone who ultimately decided to buy an iPhone followed the five-step adoption process. They had to learn about the product, decide if they were interested or convinced to try it, try it out at the Apple Store, and decide if they wanted to buy an iPhone or keep their current phone.

Privacy Online & Off

Crump discusses the evolution of automatic license plate readers into a dominant mass-market location tracking technology in his presentation. While positioned near roads or on police vehicles, readers take photographs of passing license plates. "If license plate readers were simply used to find the bad guys, no one would object," Crump stated. However, police are increasingly collecting this data from every vehicle that passes through a plate reader in a dragnet and storing it indefinitely, resulting in truly massive databases that track the locations of a significant portion of the public in the United States. 

Numerous tracking technologies, including license plate readers, are utilized by modern law enforcement. Through data dumps from cell towers, agents can identify revealing location information about thousands of people. Another illustration comes from stingrays, which are devices that enable law enforcement to transmit signals through the walls of homes to ascertain whether or not any cell phones are present. Crump stated, "The state has been able to learn far too much about what happens behind closed doors." Additionally, law enforcement uses this information to confirm your identity. 

Police departments can inexpensively compile this data into massive databases. A National License Plate Reader System is being developed by the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to reports. Devices from a variety of national jurisdictions will feed this system's database. Crump demonstrated the negative effects of this kind of surveillance in his talk. Unmarked police cars equipped with license plate readers have driven around nearby mosques to monitor each visitor to New York. An 80-year-old retired person's license plate number was on a watch list after I sketched the protesters at political demonstrations in Great Britain. He discovered a slew of photos in the San Leandro, California, police records for Mike Katz Lacabe's license plate, some of which showed him and his two daughters getting out of their car in the driveway. "Mr. Katz-Lacabe has not been accused of any crime," Crump stated. However, hundreds of images of his vehicles are kept by the government. How come this is accepted? 

When Crump granted law enforcement such extensive surveillance authority, he warned of the tremendous potential for abuse. She advocated for more checks and balances to lessen the impact of tracking technologies. "Experience would indicate that the question is not whether such data will be misused, but when," Crump said, referring specifically to voyeurism, extortion, or political gain." The opposite is true rather, the question is when. The right to privacy of a person extends beyond the control they have over their personal information. The increasingly skewed power balance between the state and civil society must be corrected.

A.I.

When a DeepMind computer program defeated the world champion in the ancient Chinese strategy game of Go, which has more possible moves than atoms in the universe, the Chinese government experienced what has been dubbed the Sputnik moment. Will be remembered as the pivotal moment when AI became mature and everyone jumped on the bandwagon, declares Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent Chinese AI researcher, and venture capitalist. After that Go game, China's President Xi Jinping established objectives for the country to catch up to the United States in artificial intelligence by 2025 and take the lead in the world by 2030.

Shawn Cumbee and his wife Hope, Beaverton, Michigan, independent truck drivers, are certain that automation will not be able to replace them. Shawn contends that individuals continue to commit errors and invent new ones. I have no concerns. However, Hope takes a moment to consider her options when she discovers that Embark trucks are already delivering cargo on Interstate 10:Thanks to artificial intelligence, computers can now learn to drive, do accounting, scan legal documents, pack grocery bins, and do a wide range of other things for both white-collar and blue-collar workers. In addition, it explains that artificial intelligence is a type of automation and that automation has eliminated more jobs than offshore plants over the past four decades. Concerns are raised because AI may now significantly accelerate that trend.

In the next fifteen years, fifty percent of jobs will be in some way threatened by AI, according to Kai-Fu Lee, the author of AI Superpowers. He worries that the rise of AI will exacerbate another alarming trend: the widening gap between wages. Kai-Fu Lee warns that AI will worsen the situation and, in her opinion, divide society because the wealthy will likely have too much while the poor will likely have few options for escape. The film is concerned about how personal lives are being invaded by artificial intelligence and how privacy is being violated in China and the United States. A few pilot projects are using AI to give people a social credit score, and AI is used to recognize faces in many Chinese cameras. This score is used by the government to reward some people for what it considers to be good citizenship and punish others for other things. Dissident scholar Xiao Qiang asserts that China is establishing a nationwide surveillance state.

The demonstration project is located in the province of Xinjiang, where AI is being used against Muslims in a campaign that has alarmed human rights groups. China claims that more than a million ethnic Uighur people have been sent to so-called re-education camps and that technology is being used to identify potential terrorists. China, on the other hand, is exporting its technology and authoritarian methods worldwide while simultaneously constructing a bamboo curtain that includes shared infrastructure, the internet, and 5G digital systems. One of the things I worry about the most is that the world is going to split in two and that there will be a Chinese tech sector and an American tech sector, says Nicholas Thompson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine.

Also, nations will effectively be able to choose their preferred option. You will have to decide whether to join the United States or the Soviet Union, just like you did during the Cold War. Nobody finds that kind of world appealing. According to The Age of AI, American AI algorithms also collect data to sell our personal information to advertisers. Despite being less well-known, this kind of corporate surveillance is common. We pretended to use social media when we first entered this unfamiliar world. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard, claims, We behaved as if we were researching Google. We didn't know social media was using us. We had no idea that Google was trying to find us.

Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, warns that third parties can target and manipulate voters in elections by using data from companies like Google, Facebook, and others. Additionally, this puts an end to our online digital exhaustion. She asserts that Cambridge Analytica focused on political outcomes rather than advertisements precisely in this manner. Despite their promise for society and the future, a pioneer in AI Yoshua Bengio is concerned that his deep learning algorithms may also be risky: AIs are the instruments. The people in charge will benefit from using those instruments. He asserts that if those interests clash with democratic principles, democracy will suffer. A gripping look at some of the ways this brand-new technology has already altered and will continue to alter our world is provided in The Age of AI.