Tag Archives: Internet

The digital wall

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What is it about the internet that gives people permission to be awful and mean to others? I follow an astrophysicist on social media. She’s brilliant, and makes great content. She also posted a rant about all the misogynistic comments she gets from men commenting on her rather than her content. I’m not sharing any more details because it looks like she took the video down.

This is just one of many examples of people behaving badly from the safety of behind their keyboards. Many don’t even hide behind an anonymous profile, no they are just openly rude, mean, and/or sexist. I don’t understand the desire to do this? I don’t understand how a digital profile somehow creates the permissions to do this?

Would these people say the same things if they were physically in a crowded room with the person they are actively being inappropriate with? In most cases I would guess not. But somehow their keyboard acts as a digital wall separating them from their bad deeds.

I wonder what these people would think if someone was saying the same rude things they are saying online to one of their family members? Would that be enough to stop them? Would they think it was ok if a person spoke like them to their daughter? What would it take to make them realize what jerks they are being?

I’m pretty sure Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t face the sexism the female astrophysicist I mentioned above does. I bet the internet is a very different place for these two people with similar jobs. The inequity is magnified on the digital, social media front. The blatantly sexist and rude comments of yesterday-year are still alive and well on the internet.

I’m not the one getting the worst of it, so I don’t see it that much. Yet it still bothers me. I’d hope to see a change for the better soon, but I’m not terribly optimistic. In fact, I think it will likely get worse before it gets better. I hope not, but I think so.

Lateral Thinking

Like I mentioned yesterday, my dad passed away leaving hundreds of boxes to sort through. Today I found a few with memorabilia and one specific one I was looking for with a diesel fuel formula he invented. Most of the other boxes were files with copies of patents and research my dad collected. Although, there were also quite a few boxes with some strange topics he also ventured into.

As a self taught generalist, my dad was always taking ideas and combining them, and he wasn’t afraid to delve as deep into ‘wu wu’ science as he did into ‘legitimate’ research. He had a knack for seeing connections where others didn’t.

So it was no surprise when I found these periodic tables where he was identifying the elements that were prime, double prime, and Fibonacci numbers, and looking at their isotopes.

This is the kind of thing my dad did. He would think laterally and make unusual connections that would be completely missed by anyone else… and the reason they would miss it is because there isn’t a logical connection.

My dad developed a CRO/REDOX process to chemically extract platinum and other precious metals from catalytic converters and recyclable computer components. He actually got a test lab built and proved the technology, while scientists at the Ontario Research and Technology Foundation (ORTECH, now ORF-RE) said it couldn’t be done, and even after it was proven said, ‘This shouldn’t work’.

But like many things, my dad had a different angle, and in this case a different perspective on the chemistry behind the process. And when he built the prototype, he made it modular so that he could expand it rather than rebuild it. For many reasons, including terrible timing with a stock market crash, this project never got off the ground.

The ideas that my father combined allowed him to be extremely creative and innovative. He was brilliant in the connections he made. Yet that same ability was also a disability. My father was also an end-of-the-world prepper, and followed a lot of conspiracy theories.

The same lateral thinking that made his scientific mind so brilliant also created lateral (read more as sideways) connections to far out conspiracies that kept the ideas alive long after others had moved on. Among his boxes and boxes of printed patents and research are other boxes with articles that I would describe more as delusional rather than just ‘fake news’. In fact these articles date back as far as 2004, long before the term fake news existed.

I think the internet broke my dad. He was a doomsdayer since the 80’s. After we watched World War III, a miniseries that aired on NBC on January 31, 1982, he turned the TV off and had a heart-to-heart with his kids. He basically told us that WWIII was inevitable in our lifetime. I remember getting upset not just that the world was going to end, because at 15 I believed everything my dad said, but also that my younger sisters were crying as he broke this ‘news’ to us. Why did they need to know this at those ages?

It got really bad with Y2K, that’s when he started ‘prepping’, storing food and collecting thousands and thousands of dollars worth of supplies. Supplies we now need to get rid of for pennies on the dollars spent. But what really made it worse after that was the internet. Dad found all kinds of websites that he considered reliable, some of which where known Russian propaganda sites, but that didn’t phase my dad who believed all kinds of conspiracies about big media. Now I’m not saying that big media is fully trustworthy, but I’d put more weight on them than on Russian propaganda websites.

So lateral thinking was both a blessing and a curse for my dad. Making incredibly insightful scientific connections made him a brilliant scientist and inventor. And making incredibly dubious doomsday connections made him a paranoid prepper, who always believed ‘the shit is going to hit the fan’ at any moment.

There is a fine line between brilliance and madness.

Feeding the (AI) brain

I worry about the training of Artificial Intelligence using the internet as the main source of information. One of the biggest challenges in teaching AI is in teaching it how to group things. Unless a group is clearly identified, it’s not a group. That’s ok when counting items, but not ideas. What is fact vs fiction? What is truth vs a lie vs an embellishment vs an exaggeration vs a theory vs a really, really bad theory?

There are some dark places on the internet. There are some deeply flawed ideas about culture, race, gender, politics, and even health and fitness. There are porn sites that objectify women, and anti-science websites that read like they are reporting out facts. There is a lot of ‘stupid shit’ on the internet. How is this information grouped by not-yet intelligent AI systems?

There is the old saying, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, and essentially that’s my concern. Any form of artificial general intelligence is only as good as the intelligence put into the system, and while the internet is a great source of intelligent information it’s also a cesspool of ridiculous information that’s equally as easy to find. I’m not sure these two dichotomous forms of information are being grouped by AI systems in a meaningful and wise way… mainly because we aren’t smart enough to program these systems well enough to know the difference.

The tools we have for searching the internet are based on algorithms that are constantly gamed by SEO techniques and search is based on words, not ideas. The best ideas on the internet are not the ones necessarily most linked to, and often bad ideas get more clicks, likes, and attention. How does an AI weigh this? How does it group these ideas? And what conclusions does the AI make? Because the reality is that the AI needs to make decisions or it wouldn’t be considered intelligent. Are those decisions ones ‘we’ are going to want it to make? If the internet is the the main database of information then I doubt it.

When search engines become answer engines

One if the most alarming things I’ve read and heard about since I started mentioning Chat GPT and the use of predictive AI tools is that the model for profitability of content creators is going to have to change. With Google and Bing both embedding AI enhanced ‘answers’ as part of their search results, this is going to have a dramatic impact on website visits, (click-throughs and advertising views), content creators count on.

Here is a link to a very long but interesting essay by Alberto Romero on the subject: Google vs Microsoft: Microsoft’s New Bing Is a Paradigm Change for Search and the Browser

This is an excerpt from the section titled, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’,

“Giving value back to creators
One of the core business aspects of search is the reciprocal relationship between the owners of websites (content creators and publishers) and the owners of the search engines (e.g. Google and Microsoft). The relationship is based on what Nadella refers to as “fair use.” Website owners provide search engines with content and the engines give back in form of traffic (or maybe revenue, etc.). Also, search engine owners run ads to extract some profit from the service while keeping it free for the user (a business model that Google popularized and on top of which it amassed a fortune).”

and a little further down,

“…Sridhar Ramaswamy, ex-Google SVP and founder of Neva (a direct competitor of Bing and Google Search), says that “as search engines become answer engines, referral traffic will drop! It’s happened before: Google featured snippets caused this on 10-20% of queries in the past.”

So, getting a response from your search query already has a historical track record of reducing referral traffic and now search is going to get significantly better at answering questions without needing to click through to a website.

What is human (as opposed to Artificial Intelligence) created content going to look like in the future when search answers your questions that would normally require you to visit a website? What happens to creator and publisher profitability when search engines become answer engines?

Cost of communication

I’m changing my Internet and cable service this week and will save about $45 a month. Even with that savings I am blown away when I think of the amount I pay for these services and phone data plans for my family.

Yes, I could save even more if I sacrificed speed and volume of data that my family pays for, and yes, what we pay for is a bit of a luxury compared to what others might choose. But still, the cost of these things seems ridiculously high in Canada.

Elon Musk is putting a series of geosynchronous satellites into space that will creates global wifi service. This will bypass the high costs of providing wifi in rural areas. It will also undermine the monopoly-like costs of internet access in countries like Canada. The reality is that these companies Elon will compete with will not fold. They will survive the competition, because they can afford to.

I look forward to this happening. I think Internet access should be cheap and accessible to all. It isn’t a luxury anymore and the reality is that prices in Canada make it so.

Web advertising vs micropayments

Right now, if you do a Google search for a product like an iPhone, above the link to Apple.com you will see ads to purchase a phone. Those ads are how Google makes its money.

Meanwhile, if the search you are doing isn’t a product, but an idea or concept, then those ads aren’t always about selling something, but rather about sharing content… and that content is usually surrounded by advertising. That’s how a website gets you to look at ads on their page, how they get advertisers to pay them for views and clicks on their pages. This race for your attention is not free, and what you see on the internet, at the top of searches, and on websites next to, above and below, the content you want to see is the price we all pay… the price of our attention.

I think that there is going to be a social media platform that will show up in the next few years that is going to figure out micropayments as a means to share ad-free content. Want to see a news article with no ads? Pay 1/10th of a cent. Find a great article you really enjoyed? Give them a hand clap or two (applause of some sort), each worth 1/10th of a cent. If you really like it, you can share 10 X of your applause… or a whole penny. Enjoying some art shared or creative writing? You decide how much applause to give.

You’ll have people not paying much, but others will be generous. And along with this will come a culture of disliking sites that embed advertising. We will see a lot more ad-free content. News sites might insist on a micropayment. The challenge is how to get people to ‘buy in’ to paying rather than seeing ads. I think this will happen with a social media platform that does 2 things:

1. Charges about $10 to join.

2. Gives you 9,500 ‘points’ to give away. (10,000 times 1/10 of a cent minus a 50 cent or 500 point fee.)

Basically, you will be given the points to give away through applause for websites you like. Because these points will be called something fun besides 1/10th of a cent, and because you get so many of them, you’ll think nothing of sharing a few of them on content you like. When you run low on them, you can purchase another $5, $10, or $20 more, but with a decreasing commission:

$5 gets you 4,250 points

$10 gets you 9,500 points

$20 gets you 19,700 points

The sweet spot will be $10, which isn’t a lot of money if the points last the typical person more than a month.

Some people will use their points miserly, others will spend over $20 a month. Overall, an economy of paying, or rather ‘applauding’ content that is shred ad-free will become something people are happy to do.

It will be interesting to see how micropayments will influence the content that is shared. Will we see sites begging for applause? Viral videos earning more money than advertising could ever get them? Sites donating their applause to charity? There are many ways this format could go, but I think one thing you will see is a genuine hate for websites that share ads embedded in content… and I’m looking forward to this!

Empathy, Not Technology, Is Core of the Problem and the Solution

danah boyd | apophenia » “Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers

[…] When I first started interviewing teenagers about bullying, they would dismiss my questions. “Bullying is so middle/elementary school,” they’d say. […]

[…] Of course, teens do take it seriously. And they do misinterpret when people are messing with them. And they do take minor social infractions personally. And then things escalate. And here’s what makes bullying so difficult to address. So often, one person thinks that they’re not at fault and that they’re simply a victim of bullying. But those who are engaged in the bullying see it entirely differently. They blame the person and see what they’re doing as retaliation. None of this is communicated, of course, so things can quickly spiral out of control without anyone really knowing where it all began.[…]

Empathy, Not Technology, Is Core of the Problem and the Solution

[…] We need interventions that focus on building empathy, identifying escalation, and techniques for stopping the cycles of abuse. We need to create environments where young people don’t get validated for negative attention and where they don’t see relationship drama as part of normal adult life. The issues here are systemic. And it’s great that the Internet is forcing us to think about them, but the Internet is not the problem here. It’s just one tool in an ongoing battle for attention, validation, and status. And unless we find effective ways of getting to the root of the problem, the Internet will just continue to be used to reinforce what is pervasive.

via zephoria.org

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Finally, a well said and researched article that recognizes that the Internet is not the problem… It just amplifies the issues already present.

The bullying that Ann and her brother endured was as cruel as anything that happens on the internet and back then, before cell phones, cell phone cameras, MSN, Facebook and YouTube, it didn’t matter if the information didn’t go beyond the class or the school because that was the scale of the ‘whole world knowing’ anyway.

Blaming the internet or technology for making bullying worse is like blaming a gun for shooting someone. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.

We need to develop empathy from a young age, infuse caring across the curriculum, and as Dana says, stop validating negative attention and start breaking the cycles of abuse that escalate into hurtful scenarios, (both on and off the internet).

“Empathy, Not Technology, Is Core of the Problem and the Solution!”