Category: Social Stream
César Hidalgo has a radical suggestion for fixing our broken political system: automate it! In this provocative talk, he outlines a bold idea to bypass politicians by empowering citizens to create personalized AI representatives that participate directly in democratic decisions. Explore a new way to make collective decisions and expand your understanding of democracy.
“It’s not a communication problem, it’s a cognitive bandwidth problem.”—César Hidalgo
He’s definitely right about the second part, but it’s also a communication problem because most of political speech is nuanced toward the side of untruths and covering up facts and potential outcomes to represent the outcome the speaker wants. There’s also far too much of our leaders saying “Do as I say (and attempt to legislate) and not as I do.” Examples include things like legislators working to actively take away things like abortion or condemn those who are LGBTQ when they actively do those things for themselves or their families or live out those lifestyles in secret.
“One of the reasons why we use Democracy so little may be because Democracy has a very bad user interface and if we improve the user interface of democracy we might be able to use it more.”—César Hidalgo
This is an interesting idea, but definitely has many pitfalls with respect to how we know AI systems currently work. We’d definitely need to start small with simpler problems and build our way up to the more complex. However, even then, I’m not so sure that the complexity issues could ultimately be overcome. On it’s face it sounds like he’s relying too much on the old “clockwork” viewpoint of phyiscs, though I know that obviously isn’t (or couldn’t be) his personal viewpoint. There’s a lot more pathways for this to become a weapon of math destruction currently than the utopian tool he’s envisioning.
🎞 Ocean’s Eight (2018) | Warner Bros. | ★★★
Directed by Gary Ross. With Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling. Debbie Ocean gathers an all-female crew to attempt an impossible heist at New York City's yearly Met Gala.
Pretty solid, but missing some zing and more complicated plotting compared to the others.
Rating:
📺 June 25, 2019 – PBS NewsHour | PBS
Tuesday on the NewsHour, the acting head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection has resigned after roughly two months in the position, at a time when legislation around immigration and border management hangs in the balance. Plus: The cultural impact of the Stonewall Riots, policy around period products, sexual assault allegations against President Trump and a book on “The Death of Politics.”
👓 How To Make Your WordPress Admin Columns Sortable | Rachel Cherry
Rachel Cherry (bamadesigner.com)Custom WordPress admin columns can be pretty helpful for quickly viewing, and managing, your content from the main edit screen. So why not take the action up a notch by making your columns sortable?
I know that David Shanske has some work like this on his roadmaps for some of the IndieWeb plugin back ends, so I’m tagging him in the offhand chance that he can swipe some code and borrow the examples.