“Silicon Valley’s biggest failing is not poor marketing of its products, or follow-through on promises, but, rather, the distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry. Two years ago, on my blog, I wrote, “It is important for us to talk about the societal impact of what Google is doing or what Facebook can do with all the data. If it can influence emotions (for increased engagements), can it compromise the political process?””

Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-has-an-empathy-vacuum
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“Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that.”

Death Is Optional | Edge.org
https://www.edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional
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“You can go further. In the accounts given by philosophers like Bernard Stiegler, the human stands on the point of vanishing entirely; we become something incidental to a total technological system. As he points out, a human being without any technological prostheses is nothing, an unsteady sac of flesh defined only by what it doesn’t have: no shelter, no protection, no society. We create tools, but technical apparatuses and their milieus advance according to their own logic, and these non-living objects have their own strange form of life. Our brains developed to control our hands; human consciousness itself was only the by-product of a technical evolution that moved from flint-knapping to the hammer to the virtual bartender; its real job isn’t to perform any particular task but to perpetuate itself. “Robots,” he writes, are “seemingly designed no longer to free humanity from work but to consign it either to poverty or stress.””

Watching the World Rot at Europe's Largest Tech Conference
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-warped-world-of-web-summit/508442/
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“Memorial bots — even the primitive ones that are possible using today’s technology — seemed both inevitable and dangerous. “It’s definitely the future — I’m always for the future,” she said. “But is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? Where is the line? Where are we? It screws with your brain.””

When her best friend died, she used artificial intelligence to keep talking to him
https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot
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“The Cultured Beef Project aims to create artificial meat in the laboratory. Technicians remove muscle cells from the shoulder of a cow, and feed the cells with a nutrient mix in a Petri dish, and they grow into muscle tissue. From a few starter cells one can derive tens of tons of meat. The whole world could be fed with meat from muscle cells grown in a lab.

In 2013 the cost of lab–grown meat for a hamburger was $325,000. By 2016 it had dropped to below $50. The biggest obstacle so far is not technology but the taste–that is unlike what people are used to because blood, fat, and connective tissue are missing. But researchers are working to improve that. The slogan of a similar company, Modern Meadow, says that the “future is cultured, not slaughtered”.”

The Future of Food - The Food of the Future - The Medical Futurist
https://medicalfuturist.com/the-future-of-food-the-food-of-the-future/
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“Ethics is about having an intelligent discussion, not about answers, as such—it's about having the tools to think carefully about real-world actions and their effects, not about prescribing what to do in any situation. Discussion leads to values that inform decision-making and acti”

The ethics of artificial intelligence
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence
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“Kate Crawford, an AI researcher with Microsoft Research New York, MIT, and NYU, told The Intercept, “I‘d call this paper literal phrenology, it’s just using modern tools of supervised machine learning instead of calipers. It’s dangerous pseudoscience.”

Crawford cautioned that “as we move further into an era of police body cameras and predictive policing, it’s important to critically assess the problematic and unethical uses of machine learning to make spurious correlations,” adding that it’s clear the authors “know it’s ethically and scientifically problematic, but their ‘curiosity’ was more important.””

Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/18/troubling-study-says-artificial-intelligence-can-predict-who-will-be-criminals-based-on-facial-features/
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“But the really worrying thing is that the Internet, which most of us heralded as a way to bring truth to the masses, is in fact turning into a horribly efficient way of delivering carefully crafted lies to the most vulnerable members of society, namely the gullible or poorly educated (often the same individuals).”

Google, Facebook and the Search for Truth - The Futures Agency | A global network of futurists and keynote speakers
https://thefuturesagency.com/2016/11/16/google-facebook-and-the-search-for-truth/
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“Mr. Obama, who rode many of these digital tools to the presidency, was accommodative of their rise; his administration broadly deferred to the tech industry in a way that bordered on coziness, and many of his former lieutenants have decamped to positions in tech.

Mr. Trump’s win promises to rip apart that relationship. The incoming president had few kind words for tech giants during the interminable campaign that led to his victory. Mr. Trump promised to initiate antitrust actions against Amazon, repeatedly vowed to force Apple to make its products in the United States, and then called for a boycott of the company when it challenged the government’s order to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone. Mr. Trump’s immigration plans are anathema to just about every company in tech.”

Silicon Valley Reels After Trump’s Election - NYTimes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/technology/trump-election-silicon-valley-reels.html?nytmobile=0
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“It’s shown us—and not for the first time—how the same communication tools that can connect strangers in far-flung parts of the world can also be used to disseminate gas chamber memes and death threats. It’s shown us how the same platforms that put a world of facts and information at our fingertips can just as easily be used to undermine basic truths. It’s shown us that our most personal communications—so many of them digital—are exceptionally vulnerable to anyone with a vendetta and that the online masses, typically so precious about their own privacy, would be all too eager to see what we’ve got to hide. And we all have something to hide.”

The 2016 Election Exposes the Very, Very Dark Side of Tech
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/2016-election-exposes-dark-side-tech/
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