Comments on a KurzweilAI politics & society piece
Around 2010 Alyssa was doing fact-checking and editorial review for KurzweilAI.net, working with Amara D. Angelica. This is a line-by-line commentary on a draft piece touching on Google Buzz, government surveillance, Fusion Centers, and the politics of skill polarization. The original draft is not preserved; what follows are her flagged passages and proposed corrections.
I took a computing & privacy law class at Yale a few months ago, so I’ve recently reviewed this material.
“major stir because its automatic creation of a circle of friends (that would in turn be accessible by those same friends)…”
Clumsy explanation of Buzz. Rewrite: “major stir, because its default settings let anyone see the names of the people you emailed most frequently.”
“The Government has unrestricted access to personal data.”
I’d modify this. The government’s access is not “unrestricted”; it can access people’s private files under a court order, but such orders require evidence to be presented before a judge of why the access is necessary.
“Indeed, there is a trap door in encryption that is mandated by law so that the government can access private communications for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”
This is, to be blunt, nonsense. The article linked is pure speculation about things that might possibly happen, not things that have already happened. A great deal of encryption software is open-source, and the government could not plausibly insert such back doors without them being readily detected.
“a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.”
I’d paraphrase this article instead of quoting it. It seems somewhat sensationalist; the government’s capabilities under the system seem to be restricted to telephones, not “communication devices” generally (which would include everything from computers to carrier pigeons and smoke signals).
“In 2009, the Fusion Centers had a budget of about $75 billion and employed almost 200,000 operatives worldwide…”
Complete nonsense. The figure quoted is for the combined budget of every operation by every United States intelligence agency (including the FBI, whose primary focus isn’t even intelligence, but law enforcement) — not “fusion centers” specifically.
“In addition to the continued elimination of jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder…”
This is untrue, as far as I can tell. What’s being eliminated isn’t jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder (retail, manual labor, etc.) but jobs in the middle of the skill ladder (semi-skilled manufacturing and trade jobs). There still appear to be enough unskilled jobs that many businesses want to prevent illegal immigrants (who primarily do unskilled labor) from being deported, so they have enough warm bodies to do these jobs.
“The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India.”
Not technically false, but much less plausible than it was 40 years ago.
“The movement does succeed in establishing continuing education as a primary right associated with employment.”
I haven’t seen any evidence for this, and the discussion doesn’t establish any. Continuing education is becoming more common, certainly, but it wasn’t established by Luddites, and it isn’t seen as a “right” like sick days and health insurance.
“Today, we spend ten times as much on a per capita basis (in constant dollars) on K through 12 education as compared to 1870.”
Certainly true, but it doesn’t establish that education is better — only that more is spent on it.
“There is continuing concern with an underclass that the skill ladder has left far behind. The size of the underclass appears to be stable, however.”
This appears to be true. Statistics show that the income of the second quintile (between 20th and 40th percentile) has remained stable or slightly increased, not gone down. If the underclass were growing larger, one would expect the incomes of those in this bracket to fall toward the bottom bracket.
“Although not politically popular, the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence.”
Partially correct. The underclass is politically neutralized, but this is primarily because all of the means through which this group could coordinate are owned by the elite, not because of public assistance (which was essentially gutted in 1996). The Internet might become an exception in the next ten years, but society’s poor are unskilled, and therefore unlikely to be able to use the Internet effectively.