9 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2023
    1. In 2010, Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell wrote a book about tech innovation that described the way technologists fixate on the “proximate future” — a future that exists “just around the corner.” The authors, one a computer scientist, and the other a tech industry veteran, were examining emerging tech developments in “ubiquitous computing,” which promised that the sensors, mobile devices, and tiny computers embedded in our surroundings would lead to ease, efficiency, and general quality of life. Dourish and Bell argue that this future focus distracts us from the present while also absolving technologists of responsibility for the here and now.

      Proximate Future is a future that is 'nearly here' but never quite gets here. Ref posits this is a way to distract from issues around a tech now and thus lets technologists dodge responsibility and accountability for the now, as everyone debates the issues of a tech in the near future. It allows the technologists to set the narrative around the tech they develop. Ref: [[Divining a Digital Future by Paul Dourish Genevieve Bell]] 2010

      Vgl the suspicious call for reflection and pause wrt AI by OpenAI's people and other key players. It's a form of [[Ethics futurising dark pattern 20190529071000]]

      It may not be a fully intentional bait and switch all the time though: tech predictions, including G hypecycle put future key events a steady 10yrs into the future. And I've noticed when it comes to open data readiness and before that Knowledge management present vs desired [[Gap tussen eigen situatie en verwachting is constant 20071121211040]] It simply seems a measure of human capacity to project themselves into the future has a horizon of about 10yrs.

      Contrast with: adjacent possible which is how you make your path through [[Evolutionair vlak van mogelijkheden 20200826185412]]. Proximate Future skips actual adjacent possibles to hypothetical ones a bit further out.

  2. May 2023
  3. Mar 2023
  4. Mar 2022
  5. Jul 2021
    1. e book does not wholly succeed, but Jonas’s central idea ispowerful and has not been given the attention it deserves. !at ideaarises from one governing insight: Under technocratic modernity,“the altered nature of human action, with the magnitude andnovelty of its works and their impact on man’s global future, raisesmoral issues for which past ethics, geared to the dealings of manwith his fellow-men within narrow horizons of space and time, has

      left us unprepared.” Although Heidegger found it necessary, in his attempt to rethink metaphysics, to go back to the insights of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Jonas does not believe that any earlier thinkers hold the key to the ethical challenge posed by technocratic modernity, because no previous society possessed powers that could extend its reach so far in both space and time. A wholly new ethics is required, and is required simply because of the scope of our technologies.

      Hans Jonas, a student of Martin Heidegger, argues in The Imperative of Responsibility, that modern technology requires a new ethical framework because no previous societies possessed the technical powers to extend their reach so far in time and space as ours currently do.

  6. Mar 2021
    1. the community is both endlessly creative and genuinely interested in solving big issues in meaningful ways. Whether it's their commitment to careful (and caring) community stewardship or their particular strain of techno-ethics, I have been consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at what I've seen during the last twelve months. I don't always see eye-to-eye with their decisions and I don't think that the community is perfect, but it's consistently (and deliberately) striving to be better, and that's a fairly rare thing, online or off.
  7. Jul 2020
  8. May 2020