(Marketplace)
Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood sat down with Robinson to discuss the real-life implications of issues brought up in the film, and how some of the critiques it made about society 10 years ago are still relevant now.
Category: Technology
How to talk about God in Silicon Valley
(Quartz at Work)
Traditional religion in the Bay Area is being replaced with another sort of faith, a belief in the power of technology and science to save humanity. It’s a creed that says poverty and disease are simply programming challenges yet to be solved, bad code to be debugged. There’s a reason technologists use words like “evangelist” and “mission” to talk about themselves and their work.Farther out on the fringes is the belief in the technological singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence will evolve to a point where it surpasses human intelligence, resulting in a fundamental transformation of civilization. In some versions of the theory, people will merge with machines. Humans will become both obsolete and eternal.
For men and women immersed in the old-fashioned sort of religion, Silicon Valley’s faith in itself is a challenge. How can a religion based on ancient texts hope to compete with something as new and exciting—and sacrifice-free—as technology’s promise?
Where Silicon Valley Is Going to Get in Touch With Its Soul
(New York Times)
BIG SUR, Calif. — Silicon Valley, facing a crisis of the soul, has found a retreat center.
It has been a hard year for the tech industry. Prominent figures like Sean Parker and Justin Rosenstein, horrified by what technology has become, have begun to publicly denounce companies like Facebook that made them rich.
And so Silicon Valley has come to the Esalen Institute, a storied hippie hotel here on the Pacific coast south of Carmel, Calif. After storm damage in the spring and a skeleton crew in the summer, the institute was fully reopened in October with a new director and a new mission: It will be a home for technologists to reckon with what they have built.
How A Handful Of Tech Companies Control Billions Of Minds Every Day
Apple’s sorta powered by 100 percent renewable energy worldwide
Apple announced today that its business is now powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources. The news is a major victory that the iPhone maker has been working toward for years through the purchase of green energy bonds and other renewable investments in its supply chain and physical infrastructure. The company’s last milestone, announced two years ago, was 93 percent of its worldwide operations running on clean energy.
The announcement comes just one week after Google announced that it now purchases enough renewable energy to offset its global energy consumption. Similarly, Apple’s global operations, including some suppliers in China and facilities in places without access to clean energy, are not technically 100 percent renewable, meaning not every single joule or electron used is initially created by wind, solar, or other green energy plants and farms.
Hooray!!! (sorta)
A Brain-Boosting Prosthesis Moves From Rats To Humans
If you want to get technical, the brain-booster in question is a “closed-loop hippocampal neural prosthesis. Closed loop because the signals passing between each patient’s brain and the computer to which it’s attached are zipping back and forth in near-real-time. Hippocampal because those signals start and end inside the test subject’s hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region of the brain critical to the formation of memories. “We’re looking at how the neurons in this region fire when memories are encoded and prepared for storage,” says Robert Hampson, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and lead author of the paper describing the experiment in the latest issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering
Addiction Rehab Is Broken. Can Technology Fix It?
Is there an App for THAT!
ZacherySiegel’stime in rehab for an opioid addiction left him humiliated and desperate to know why his friends were dying. So he researched a new wave of app developers are trying to do things differently
Apple’s Health app can now display medical records from 39 health systems
iPhone users at more than 100 hospitals and clinics in the US can now access parts of their medical records through the Health app, Apple announced today. The Health Records section of the app debuted in January with the iOS 11.3 beta, and today’s update makes it available to everyone who updates their phone to the latest version.
The medical information — such as allergies, medical conditions, vaccinations, lab tests, medical procedures, and vitals — will be available to iPhone users who are patients at 39 health systems that are working with Apple, including Stanford Medicine and Johns Hopkins.
Danah Boyd SXSW EDU Keynote | What Hath We Wrought?
Danah Boyd’s SXSW EDU keynote, What Hath We Wrought?, takes a powerful look at media literacy, the widespread consumption of fake news and the cultural implications of media manipulation.
Is The Future Of Work Necessarily Glamorous? Digital Nomads And ‘Van Life’
Digital nomadism continues its steady rise in most western countries. It consists of a mobile lifestyle that encompasses corporate remote workers, freelancers and entrepreneurs. Laptops, smartphones, wi-fi connections, coworking spaces, coffee shops and public libraries are some of the key components of this new work culture.
Dean’s List 