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Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

sciencemag.org

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Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#181

Post by salawat »

southerntofu wrote: post #132
streamofdigits wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its the defining issue of our times and there is some of nuance: First, there is room (imho) for conventional growth in many parts of the world. Its insane that people go starving, without shelter or water while others throw away truckloads of food - because of "xyz". Then there is the branch of "personal growth" that is decoupled from material consumption. Getting every functioning brain to fully develop its faculti…

The fact that there's starving folks and throwaway-food, and more empty apartments than homeless persons, is an argument against growth... at least on a global level. In a system based on private property, where a piece of paper determines ownership and speculation determines production (instead of actual needs), production is necessarily harmful. Anti-productivism is not about not producing anything at all, but rath…

The apartment and food issue is actually a consequence of rigid logistics. Stuff doesn't just magically move. Yes. Food is thrown away. Why? People aren't buying it. Why? Not enough buying power/willingness to do so/capability. People are not naturally static. They have urges. They have tastes/desires etc. Industry is however, static.

The Apartment issue is perverse incentives (housing as "investment vehicle", and not everybody wanting to live where the Market assumes they want to).

The funny thing is, from the advertiser's point of view, they think they are solving both these problems by reaching out to that poor uninformed consumer to pull their attention to what it is they need. It completely discounts the tendency for natural damping of aggressively constant stimuli as an adaptive response. It also discounts the enormity and disturbing nature of the infrastructure implemented to further that pursuit.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#182

Post by southerntofu »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175
southerntofu wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that there's starving folks and throwaway-food, and more empty apartments than homeless persons, is an argument against growth... at least on a global level. In a system based on private property, where a piece of paper determines ownership and speculation determines production (instead of actual needs), production is necessarily harmful. Anti-productivism is not about not producing anything at all, but rath…

> organize into autonomous communes Humans once operated like this. We were violent, suspicious of one another and traded from time to time. Most people died violent deaths or starved. (Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune on the promise of improving its wellbeing by taking your’s stuff.) Also, I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York.

> We were violent, suspicious

What's your source? Some people argue the exact opposite. Personally, i don't believe in human nature but i believe in the power of cultures to shape our lives, so the two situations are entirely possible in my view.

> Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune

That's not how it works. It's precisely when there is already power and privilege that a police force is established, to protect those, not the people. When there is less authority/privilege in a community, there is no police force: the people arm and defend themselves directly (popular self-defense).

> I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York

Is it a bad thing? I'm not entirely against some goods crossing some distances for some reasons, but of course you couldn't eat avocados in NY everyday.

What good does eating avocados bring to yourself and your community, compared to the social/environmental damages caused by huge monoculture of avocado and transport of it over long distances using fossil fuels?

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#183

Post by wizzwizz4 »

XorNot wrote: post #173
tremon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When a measure becomes a goal, it seizes to be a good measure." But as you say, the problem isn't economic growth in itself, but the fact that our entire (debt-based) economy is predicated on eternal growth. Eventually, every population reaches a steady-state equilibrium with its environment (even an artificial environment such as "the economy"). The hyper-focus on economic growth and our dependence on it causes all…

Again, this is not what economic growth is. Any efficiency improvement, any self-improvement, anything, is economic growth. If you don't have economic growth, then tomorrow cannot be better then today. But that is a very different question to "should we cut down more rainforest?" You've got the cause and effect backwards, and it's exactly what lobbyists for the problem areas want: arguing against economic growth is p…

But people wouldn't be cutting down the rainforest if they weren't rewarded for it. If we patch each problem as it comes along, we're spending a lot of political will on the problem.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#184

Post by southerntofu »

tgv wrote: post #177
southerntofu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you say that? It sounds like classical ecologist rhetoric. Stop producing shit, stop trying to measure what cannot be measure. Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better. Sounds like a better and more serious political program to me than any other political party i've heard lately. But hey i'm an anarchist so "fuck capitalism" has always been my program, it's just not what we h…

> stop trying to measure what cannot be measure That'll work out just fine, I'm sure. > Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better. Literally 99.8% of the population is housed and fed. But saying economic growth (however you define it) is the problem, means that economic shrinkage is a solution. I'm not so sure about that. I'm also 100% convinced the problem isn't economic growth, but po…

>> stop trying to measure what cannot be measure > That'll work out just fine, I'm sure.

?

> Literally 99.8% of the population is housed and fed.

You obviously live in a bubble. In USA or France, there's millions of people living below the poverty line despite residing in the richest nations on Earth (that are so rich because they are pillaging every other nation there is through neocolonial schemes).

There's countless homeless folks and even more mishoused folks and persons forced to live in bad conditions despite there being millions of empty apartments...

> economic shrinkage is a solution

Economic shrinkage is the only solution is you want the next generation to have drinkable water. All scientists agree we can't go on like that, it's not exactly rocket science.

> the problem isn't economic growth, but pollution and other ways of exploiting nature

It's entirely correlated. There is no economic growth without extractivism. Hence the degrowth movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#185

Post by wizzwizz4 »

XorNot wrote: post #174
woliveirajr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you stop buying bottled water and use tap water, economy is shrinking. Reduce tap water and get some from your backyard and it shrinks again. Healthier economy growth

Question: what happens to all the money you don't spend on bottled water? The economy does not shrink because you make a process more efficient.

If you don't need anything else, it does.

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#186

Post by wly_cdgr »

This kind of shit is just another example of why OSH is so important. Anyone who thinks we can convince people not to adopt a technology like this at scale is absolutely kidding themselves...we MUST develop functionally equivalent, affordable, and sexually appealing open alternatives that make privacy the easy, automatic default

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#187

Post by Cederfjard »

southerntofu wrote: post #182
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> organize into autonomous communes Humans once operated like this. We were violent, suspicious of one another and traded from time to time. Most people died violent deaths or starved. (Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune on the promise of improving its wellbeing by taking your’s stuff.) Also, I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York.

> We were violent, suspicious What's your source? Some people argue the exact opposite. Personally, i don't believe in human nature but i believe in the power of cultures to shape our lives, so the two situations are entirely possible in my view. > Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune That's not how it works. It's precisely when there is already power and privilege that a police force is establis…

What does it mean that you don’t believe in human nature? Surely there has to be some baseline that’s based in genes and hormones and so on (that we’re not yet sophisticated enough to precisely define, of course). Obviously nurture plays a huge role as well.

Or do you believe that if you were raised like a tiger in the wild, you would think and behave exactly like a wild tiger?

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#188

Post by XorNot »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #185
XorNot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: what happens to all the money you don't spend on bottled water? The economy does not shrink because you make a process more efficient.

If you don't need anything else, it does.

Then how do you have all that money? And where are you keeping it?

(1) Earning that money is still growing the economy, and (2) even a zero-interest bank account is growing the economy (you're just not seeing any remuneration for your part in that) - and (3) even if you took the money home and destroyed it, since you're still working, you're providing a very useful deflationary function since it means someone else can print more money safely (and once again you're helping grow the economy, just yielding your output to a third party).

Re: Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads

#190

Post by WolfRazu »

southerntofu wrote: post #143
skummetmaelk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate what people will sacrifice in order to be able to say "Alexa, what's the weather like today" rather than pull out their phone and open the weather app which is probably faster to do anyway. "But what if I have my hands full with stuff" they'll say. Well, will you really be able to remember what Alexa says about the weather if you're busy doing other stuff anyway? All everyone can ever point out as a…

You underestimate what people will sacrifice in order to be able to ask their phone about the weather instead of taking a look through the window. Sorry, couldn't resist.

I really hate this argument. You can't reliably determine the exact temperature or future weather conditions by looking out of the window.
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