Aug 30, 2016 10:28 PM
Can Satellites Learn to 'See' Poverty?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...ty/497153/
EXCERPT: [...] For the last few decades, and almost since astronauts first captured images of the nocturnal Earth, researchers have recognized that “night lights” data indirectly indexes the wealth of people producing the light. This econometric power seems to work across the planet: Not only do cities glow brighter than farmland, but American cities outshine Indian cities; and as a country’s GDP increases, so does its nighttime luminosity. [...]
Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey—except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same.
A new paper from a team at Stanford, published last week in Science, applies a trendy technique to this tricky problem. In order to make night lights more discerning, engineers and computer scientists fed a convolutional neural net—a standard type of artificial intelligence program—a series of data sets. They wanted to give it the insight of the night-light data while freeing it of its pitfalls....
The internet as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud
https://aeon.co/essays/the-internet-as-a...cent-fraud
"Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency..."
EXCERPT: [...] The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his testament The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833). By fulfilling its ‘mechanical purposes’, he wrote, the US would turn itself into a new Eden, a ‘state of superabundance’ where ‘there will be a continual feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations’, not to mention ‘vegetables of infinite variety and appearance’.
[...] The revelation continues to this day, the technological paradise forever glittering on the horizon. Even money men have taken sidelines in starry-eyed futurism. In 2014, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent out a rhapsodic series of tweets – he called it a ‘tweetstorm’ – announcing that computers and robots were about to liberate us all from ‘physical need constraints’. Echoing Etzler (and Karl Marx), he declared that ‘for the first time in history’ humankind would be able to express its full and true nature: ‘we will be whoever we want to be.’ And: ‘The main fields of human endeavour will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, adventure.’ The only thing he left out was the vegetables.
Such prophesies might be dismissed as the prattle of overindulged rich guys, but for one thing: they’ve shaped public opinion. By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests. If, after all, the technologists are creating a world of superabundance, a world without work or want, their interests must be indistinguishable from society’s. To stand in their way, or even to question their motives and tactics, would be self-defeating. It would serve only to delay the wonderful inevitable....
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...ty/497153/
EXCERPT: [...] For the last few decades, and almost since astronauts first captured images of the nocturnal Earth, researchers have recognized that “night lights” data indirectly indexes the wealth of people producing the light. This econometric power seems to work across the planet: Not only do cities glow brighter than farmland, but American cities outshine Indian cities; and as a country’s GDP increases, so does its nighttime luminosity. [...]
Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey—except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same.
A new paper from a team at Stanford, published last week in Science, applies a trendy technique to this tricky problem. In order to make night lights more discerning, engineers and computer scientists fed a convolutional neural net—a standard type of artificial intelligence program—a series of data sets. They wanted to give it the insight of the night-light data while freeing it of its pitfalls....
The internet as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud
https://aeon.co/essays/the-internet-as-a...cent-fraud
"Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency..."
EXCERPT: [...] The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his testament The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833). By fulfilling its ‘mechanical purposes’, he wrote, the US would turn itself into a new Eden, a ‘state of superabundance’ where ‘there will be a continual feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations’, not to mention ‘vegetables of infinite variety and appearance’.
[...] The revelation continues to this day, the technological paradise forever glittering on the horizon. Even money men have taken sidelines in starry-eyed futurism. In 2014, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent out a rhapsodic series of tweets – he called it a ‘tweetstorm’ – announcing that computers and robots were about to liberate us all from ‘physical need constraints’. Echoing Etzler (and Karl Marx), he declared that ‘for the first time in history’ humankind would be able to express its full and true nature: ‘we will be whoever we want to be.’ And: ‘The main fields of human endeavour will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, adventure.’ The only thing he left out was the vegetables.
Such prophesies might be dismissed as the prattle of overindulged rich guys, but for one thing: they’ve shaped public opinion. By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests. If, after all, the technologists are creating a world of superabundance, a world without work or want, their interests must be indistinguishable from society’s. To stand in their way, or even to question their motives and tactics, would be self-defeating. It would serve only to delay the wonderful inevitable....
