Why doesn't Twitter have something like WordPress's Akismet? Akismet is a plugin that filters spam by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites. It uses that information to generate rules to block future spam. I know that bad actors can easily create new Twitter accounts, but should also be easy for a large group of people to tag them in real time.
And I'd imagine if you can create an algorithm that can predict what you'd like to buy, surely an algorithm could be created to identify both hate speech and the speaker based on a few online real-time gestures. Identifying these storms of attacks, like the ones against Leslie Jones, is not too different from identifying the events that Twitter wants to sell advertising against.
Twitter valued being unfiltered at a certain point, but now the stream is quite polluted.
Every once in a while I hear that some “scientist” is working on a method to upload knowledge to the human brain. Ideally this would work like it did in the film “The Matrix.” A person needs to learn some sort of skill or master some area of knowledge, and rather than putting in hours of study and dedication. They upload the knowledge needed in a matter of seconds. Mastery is instant.
I wonder if knowledge is uploaded or downloaded? I suppose it depends on where you're standing.
What would knowledge have to be in order for it to be capable of being uploaded? What would a brain have to be in order to accept knowledge using this method?
In practice, if some process like this were ever to be created, it would look more like something by Philip K. Dick. Rather than uploading skills that increase a person's capability in the future, the market for downloading pleasant memories of a luxurious vacation to Mars would dominate.
Assuming you could lower the price sufficiently, everyone would upload everything. Why wouldn't they? “We can remember it for you wholesale.”
Of course, knowledge isn't like that. It's not uploadable. And brains aren't like that. They aren't computer hard disks.
One of the best uses for enterprise instant messaging apps is to engage in a backchannel conversation while engaged in a tedious conference call. It's an excellent stage for comedy. Talking back to the screen has a long and entertaining history.
Social media, when it's not just a curated newsfeed, is a backchannel. It's a hallway conversation that comments about what's going on. Slipping advertisements into a newsfeed is what television and radio have been doing all along. It's what newspapers do. No one has really successfully monetized the backchannel.
The various social media provide backchannel tools. When a presidential election debate is on television, the backchannel is sometimes the most amusing way to watch it. The jokes are quick, in real time, and sometimes really provide the best insights into what's going on. The regular news media generally waits until the event is over before weighing in with their official analysis. But during the show, they've got their own backchannel going.
We're not really meant to see the backchannel. It's a private joke, just between us. When an attempt is made to foreground the backchannel and monetize it through advertising or some other data sale, the backchannel creates another backchannel to comment on what just happened.
The backchannel must constantly step out of the light in order to provide the proper cover for the kind of conversations it hosts. The best hope of those trying to monetize the backchannel is to create a front channel and call it a backchannel.
Of course, the best place to learn about those kind of efforts is on the backchannel–that's where you'll hear the best jokes about them…
The science press tells us that human “mini-brains” are being produced for a cost of .25 cents each. They’re made from human stem cells and are about the size of a fly’s eye. Unnamed sources close the project say that these mini-brains “fire electrical impulses and communicate via their normal networks,” which means they “show the electro-chemical activity characteristic of thinking.”
Thomas Hartund, leader of the project assures us that these mini-brains are not sentient. This electro-chemical activity is a “primitive type of thinking,” but because there’s no “input or output” the buzzing is meaningless. The advance is meant to make certain kinds of animal testing obsolete.
Science often blunders forward with no explicit sense of its embedded metaphysical framework. On the one hand, there’s an acknowledgement of the cruelty of treating animals as instruments in a scientific experiment without regard for them as life forms. On the other, there’s no real thought about what they’ve done by creating mini-brains. For the effectiveness of a test to improve, the mini-brains must be as close as possible to human brains — and to further standardize the results, hundreds of identical mini-brains can be baked in a single batch. Before we’ve even thought about it, we’ve assured ourselves that the creation and use of a mini-brain is an allowable form of instrumentality.
No input or output. Do we really know what that means? Are we so sure that sentience requires input and output? Can we even be sure that no form of input or output is occurring? Are we even concerned with testing this assertion of “no input or output?”
It’s an interesting kind of creation, a mini-brain that is close enough, but not too close to the brain of its creator. Close is better, but too close borders on evil. Too close, and memories are produced.
All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in the rain.
