Expect 2018 to Be More Sane? Sorry, It’s Not Going to Happen

Gee: I thought my workstation computer, a new one, with an Intel super processor, with speeds up to 4 GHZ per second was at last, terra firma, the mecha of technology, the golden grail, was going to be in my reach to at last, stop all the data thievery. I was not going to move the workstation beast online. But sadly, Intel now admits, millions of processor units later that the software within its chip sets in its newest processors are exceptionally vulnerable to invasion and rewrite. Only Lenovo, the sole manufacturer who was asked to make a change to the processor's software chips and the companion software did so. Mega bucks. Mega delays. What does this mean? are you watching and reading? It is huge. Not only has Intel dismissed its responsibility to fix its own product but it demands that the vendors (this is a tech expression) who use the processor with the chips, fix the security problem. And now they are pointing fingers to other processor manufacturers like AMD. We run databases. Not the personal contact kind. Huge transactional processing databases.

When describing the Butterfly Effect you are on more solid ground when you ditch the questionable wing-flapping example and stick with the main concept—small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system.

Trump is maing too much money for Twitter for them to shut his account down. Thry do not have good monetization on their own, not that I think that would be attractive; but we could catch a little breath if Twitter shut down his account and he was forced to migrate to the Alt-Right web. Twitter is breakng its own TOS as DJT has just threatened t blow up(oh i don’t know): the World. #smh

I have no idea what this article is about. Mr. Manjoo incites paranoia and more and more chaos but mainly points out all the positive effects of tech and communication (ie. #metoo, Kalanick). And the internet did not begin public shaming. The Scarlet Letter was written in 1850. Ok, technology is a runaway train of ideas and commercialism. But this article is a little too inflammatory without any specifics. Am I really going to lose control of my identity? Is it 1984? Is my coffee grinder going to attack me? Let's just get rid of gerrymandering and slow climate change and stop being distracted by forecasts doom from unknown forces.

Technology doesn't change human beings. We originate the changes within ourselves, and afterwards use technology as an excuse. Whatever excuse we can find is always o.k. with us, because we like to think of ourselves as innocent & helpless. We are neither. :)

Increasing chaos and dysfunctionality in the social media may ultimately have a beneficial outcome. It may discredit them terminally, even among their legions of naive users. Social media were originally devised for the much more prosaic function of enabling people to keep in touch with their friends and report on their day-to-day activities. Their impact gradually expanded as less mature users discovered that they could get away with behavior that would never be tolerated in everyday life. This titillated and expanded social media audiences. The explosion in impact was cemented when the traditional media began to devote increasing attention to this circus. It is easier, after all, than real-world reporting and produces a wealth of attention-grabbing headlines. Today, instead of remaining a sideshow, it provides the basis for much of mainstream media activity. As social media content becomes more disreputable and offensive, as it certainly will despite the efforts of its proprietors, it may drive off its audience in increasing numbers. Once the lack of credibility becomes generally acknowledged, it may lose its relevance and eventually recede into the background of public life. At least one can hope.

It seems to me there is a lack of agency in the discussion. "Tech" isn't some inevitable force changing our lives. It is companies, run by humans, that claim to offer services they call "disruptive" that are often better described as "illegal." And the people who run these companies have been so richly and crazily rewarded that they are, at least in U.S. society as presently constituted, above the law. I don't know about you, but it makes me uneasy.

A corollary to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that the more complex a system becomes, the greater the propensity for that system to break down. One of the byproducts to technological change is that it adds further complexity to our social systems. The unpredictability which Mr. Majoo discusses in his article is our cognitive realization of the increased fragility which our social system is experiencing due to the unprecedented speed of technological evolution and integration with our social fabric.

Brilliant column. One can always quibble with the bits when it comes evaluating a sea change, but I know a fundamental, albeit temporary, truth when I see it. How long will that last until the next iteration of technology impact comes along? I don't know, but we'd better be watching.

May I suggest breaking free of the victimhood narrative and taking responsibility for your cognitive and emotional response to matters outside of your control? Either accept or let things go. I believe it is childish and unenlightened to expect the world outside of your own skin to provide you with a sober mind, contented heart and peaceful soul. These are states of being that are entirely up to you if you are willing to learn how to use tools such as mindfulness.

In the 60's television show "Get Smart". Maxwell Smart worked for Control, and the opposition was named Chaos. I agree, it seems like Chaos finally won.

In 2018 better ideas and policies will replace lessor ones. The process can be as simple as keeping the good and avoiding every kind of evil. While there is no evil in science, technology has no moral compass or evolutionary direction. Mankind will continue to appreciate the good stewards and should evolve to restore families by understanding that exclusion and poverty are evil. The prediction comes down to a choice of good over evil. America was generally good at making the right choice until some kinds of evil were allowed to fester and even celebrated. Even concerns about fake news can be resolved by separating the good from the evil. Hint: calumny and detraction have always been evil.

Nate Silver, whose uncannily inaccurate forecast of the 2016 election...!

'Butterfly' effects amplified by network effects into chaos is a cause for alarm. But it pales by comparison to a President with an uncertain grip on his psyche being advised by people certain in their belief that they are on the right side of history or have a direct line to God.

Thanks for the Gal Gadot comment! I'll take it from here.

The only thing that will ultimately save us is a more intelligent populace—a condition which, sadly, does not appear close to happening. Instead, all I see is the death of true intellectual curiosity—replaced by an obsessive desire to bolster one's own misguided beliefs. This is often accompanied by the companion to "fake news," which I call "fake intelligence," or people believing they KNOW what they're talking about—when in fact, they don't. True intellectual curiosity requires one admission mostly impossible for Americans today: that they in fact know very little of all there is to know—and therefore never stop searching for the real answers.

[Tech people: Why does your comment system strip out all of my "enter" keystrokes and create one long hard to read paragraph?]

This morning by cell alarm went off but I couldn't turn it off or down because some music app insisted I get it RIGHT NOW. I couldn't turn off the phone for at least a minute. I like some of the technology that we have, and I don't think people will all become unemployed because of AI. People will still be needed, just to do different types of jobs. Obviously, more work needed to be done on that weird program - if I want more music options on my cell phone, I'll get them. Now there's a good job opportunity. I do think most technology today is not well designed and makes more work for me - delving into Google for work arounds or just hints on how to fix ambiguous or strange things that go haywire whenever there is a power shortage or some other glitch. That's not how I want to spend my time. Right now a lot of technology is just wasting a lot of time - and there are often no options.

Marshall Mcluhan, philosopher and media theorist, spoke of the extension of the nervous system in the electric age. Media, such as television and now our smartphones, do not bring information and events to us, he said they bring us to the event. Our nervous system becomes engaged in the constant, ceaseless barrage of data. We project our senses into a million directions. We become diluted, unhinged from our center. Solution: Find your center. Whether through meditation, nature walks, quiet time, media fasts, etc. -- what ever works, reign in your data tentacles and breathe.

Funny that I just pulled out an old copy of Future Shock by Alvin Toffler published in 1970. It seems so conservative with his predictions. Over the years tho, my life has become much better with the availability of miraculous things such as GPS, the ability to download a world worth of books and textbooks, the internet, and so many ways to be entertained and engaged. I have never had it so good, certainly much better than my parents. As for political intrigue and climate change, they have always been there and I do not let it make me miserable. These are exciting times! Enjoy them.

There was a movie in the '70s where someone spliced together film clips of Richard Nixon saying and doing outrageous things, and it was almost believable. Of course, it was marketed as the spoof that it was. As for explosive, realistic-looking videos, have you seen the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Some of them could pass for real if you didn't know that they were extinct. The technology to make such things is becoming more available every day. I predict that instead of the world believing a bunch of false stories, people will not take anything on social media (or any other outlet) at face value. The false stories will be seen as mere entertainment, but so will the real stories. The baby will go out with the bathwater.

As a society, we need to start putting humans ahead of technology, If we have a society based on capital (robots and artificial intelligence) and start letting artificial intelligence design artificial intelligence with no controls on what it does, technology could easily change faster than our ability to understand what it is doing. At the same time that the power of money is weakening democracy, we are letting computers do most stock trades, and AI is already replacing traders. Meanwhile (despite a short-term stall in productivity probably caused by too many employees watching cat videos) productivity is increasing exponentially, as robots and artificial intelligence take over more and more jobs, even high skilled ones. As we cut investments in our children for tax cuts for the rich, and other tax cuts encourage the shift to machinery, we could be on the way to putting the vast majority of humans out of work. And AI traders will care even less about that then the hedge fund managers rewarding companies for firing people now. Markets don't need humans to function. The only force that can keep markets focused on humans instead of profits at any cost is democracy, but democracy is under attack at every level, as the rich try to convince us that markets are democracy, because then they would have most of the votes. We are already productive enough to provide the necessities to all of the world's people, but markets do not care about humans. We need a Human Economy.