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Category Archives: dystopia
Detecting Conspiracy Theories on Social Media (RAND)
Improving Machine Learning to Detect and Understand Online Conspiracy Theories Read more (RAND)
by William Marcellino, Todd C. Helmus, Joshua Kerrigan, Hilary Reininger, Rouslan I. Karimov, Rebecca Ann Lawrence
Wireless brain implant to make friends?
Using the tiny, battery-free brain implant device, the team were able to program and deprogram mice to socially interact with each other in real-time. When two or more mice had their devices switched on, they interacted much more than usual, and when the device was switched off, the opposite effect was nearly immediate. Read more
This Motorcycle Airbag Vest Will Stop Working If You Miss a Payment (the potential dystopia the sharing economy has given us)
Future romance: how science fiction is predicting our relationships
The contemplative indie Marjorie Prime is the latest in a long line of sci-fi films and TV shows that explore how we might date and love in the future
AI is the perfect sounding board for these modern anxieties about human connection, and 20th- and 21st-century films are filled with dystopian landscapes that showcase the loneliness of a world where intimacy is something you can buy. Read more (The Guardian)
Deepfakes and the future they can distort
Climate crisis: our children face wars over food and water, EU deputy warns
Older people will have to make sacrifices in the fight against climate change or today’s children will face a future of fighting wars for water and food, the EU’s deputy chief has warned.
Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the EU commission, said that if social policy and climate policy are not combined, to share fairly the costs and benefits of creating a low-carbon economy, the world will face a backlash from people who fear losing jobs or income, stoked by populist politicians and fossil fuel interests. Read more (Guardian)
Pandemic got you down? Psychologists suggest time travel — sort of.
Right now, you may find many things upsetting: You might be Zoomed out, missing your friends or mourning lost loved ones. “You’re really in the moment,” says Anne Wilson, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. “You’re living whatever’s negative and distressing.”
Temporal distancing is a way to “step outside of the unpleasant, immersed moment,” she says. To do this, imagine yourself in a later moment in time. A year from now, for example, we probably won’t still be living through the pandemic. By then, it will be mostly behind us, though much about society will have changed, and you’ll have a different perspective about it than you do now. “Thinking about ways things can get better — and that things will change, you will grow, you will learn from something that’s even unpleasant — can often give you a sense of optimism and hope,” Wilson says. Read more (Washington Post)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” Read more (Harvard Gazette)
Protopia Futures
Protopia disputes the dystopian and utopian visions of the future which currently form unproductive and finite binaries that distract us from acting now. Instead, Protopia Futures is a continuous proactive prototyping of possible futures, as Monika Bielskyte puts it, and one that pushes back on restrictive narratives of futures imagined by a privileged group of people. Read more (Medium)
