Titans of Social Media explain why they might have made a mistake.
There has been a lot of recent commentary on social media addiction, but this video summary was interesting, concise and in 15 minutes says it all.
To me what is interesting is that they all say that they could see it coming … and then did it anyway. What does that say about them. It certainly doesn’t say that they ‘put people first’.
For those of us who have lived in relatively placid times, it is hard to believe that American politics could become more chaotic than it is today... something...will push us into a new and uncertain era of politics, likely far stranger and possibly more dangerous than anything in memory. The force is technology. It's easy to think we're living through a disruptive period now, but we're only scratching the surface of what true technological change can do to a society... technological change over the past half-century has been almost trivial... however, a new pivot may be coming.Within just a few years, driverless cars will be plying the streets in great numbers, multilingual artificial intelligence programs will take over many customer service roles, and algorithms chewing over the massive amounts of data we emit will manage everything from our day-to-day health to the contents of our refrigerators. Robots are becoming more dexterous and less likely to trip over themselves, and gene editing may trigger a transformation that starts with the treatment of disease and could easily end up with the transformation of humans themselves… perhaps just 10 to 20 years from now, we will have to deal with the threat technology poses to our social order-and to our politics… widely cited work by scholars at Oxford University puts the share of jobs at risk in America…at nearly 50 percent.
The best-case scenario is one in which American society experiences a great awakening, leading to a flowering of social movements that provide the political support for significant reforms… a second, more dire scenario might come to pass: that of creeping authoritarianism… If democracy cannot respond effectively and authoritarianism does not keep the peace, then a third scenario becomes more probable-state failure…There is a fourth possible future: the deus ex machina, the external shock that creates the conditions for radical, but democratic change."