notevensurewhy:

Utopianism is always sinister. I’m with Cat (and Adam Curtis). The most serious and harmful fallacy here is the unstated premise that humanity is a system that can be benignly controlled.

catvincent:

Stowe thinks this is a utopia. I disagree, shuddering. All it would take is for someone to tweak the algorithm… and you’ve a population who literally cannot resist. Even if done with ‘loving grace’ - who the hell would *you* trust to decide that? Using what criteria?

Honestly, sounds like exactly the world the forces of Order in The Invisibles wanted.

stoweboyd:

Yesterday, I was doing a dress rehearsal for a webinar that will be live tomorrow. I was talking with Fred McClimans, Geoffrey Colon, and Alan Dickenson about the future of cloud computing and how that intersects with big data. This morning something occurred to me regarding the application of…

It is worth discussing the potential for an increased number of ways that the use of large data sets on human social interactions may well be used in the future to influence decisions taken by people - and governments across the globe would jump at the opportunities that such a system implies. This seems to me like a deliberalty naivé thought experiment though, as although human decision making is already being abrogated in favour of non-human agency I cannot foresee the sort of over-arching system being proposed here ever being feasible.

And I also agree completely with Tom and Cat here that the ‘utopia’ being portrayed seems anything but desirable.