Saturday, September 04, 2010

Couple of random thoughts on this and this.

1) Interesting, William Gibson writing about this. Remember this?

2)
"We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do."
What about Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics? Asimov's big theme is surely that technology has hard-to-codify ethical consequences.

3)
"Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory."


Compare Foucault :
"The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body," Foucault explains; "its vocation was to become a generalized function" (Discipline 207). The ultimate result is that we now live in the panoptic machine: "We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism" (Discipline 217).

1 comment:

John Powers said...

Related: Bruce Schneier at EWI Cybersecurity Summit 2010 YouTube "data is the pollution problem of the information society, all processes produce it, it stays around, it has to be dealt with and its secondary uses are what concern us."

Schneier points to the confusion of consumers imagining that they are the customers when they are really the product delivered to the customers. That confusion is very visible in the US health delivery system; where for example hospital patients are the product delivered to doctors who are the customers.