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#techlash

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Paul Krugman highlights a troubling trend: under Trump's presidency, America's scientific and educational landscape faces peril as Big Tech shifts allegiances from Democrats. Key issues include slashed science funding and rising intimidation that hinders foreign scholars. Amid a growing public distrust, once-esteemed tech figures now grapple with backlash. This shift prompts questions about the ethics of tech leaders and their alliance with Trump’s administration. Read more here: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why #PaulKrugman #BigTech #Democrats #Trump #ScienceFunding #Techlash #Regulation #SocialMedia #BidenAdministration

Paul Krugman · Why Big Tech Turned Against Democrats — and DemocracyBy Paul Krugman

How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy | MIT Technology Review (2024-12-13)

technologyreview.com/2024/12/1
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“Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.”

“Two of the more recent additions to the flourishing #techlash genre—Rob Lalka’s The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power and Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley—serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, the books chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back…”

MIT Technology Review · How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracyBy Bryan Gardiner

This year’s business travel is in the books for me: With my return from Web Summit in Lisbon Friday, the rest of 2023 has no more out-of-town conference badges or hotel keys left. That’s pretty exciting, even if CES looms seven weeks away.

11/13/2023: T-Mobile Within Striking Distance of Becoming Fifth-Largest US ISP, PCMag

The way 5G has brought choice and competition to millions of American homes remains an underappreciated story in telecom.

11/14/2023: Is big tech killing trust?, Web Summit

I interviewed Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker and University of California at Irvine professor Veena Dubal about ways that people might reclaim some leverage against tech giants. Our conversation had some hiccups, in the form of acoustics that Whittaker said made it difficult for her to hear me–even while I could hear her mostly fine.

11/14/2023: Strike Up the Bands: White House National Spectrum Strategy Light on Mobile Details, PCMag

I stayed up late Monday to file this post unpacking the long-awaited release of the White House’s spectrum-policy roadmap–and explaining how some of the spectrum bands covered in the document seem unlikely to boost bandwidth to any phones or homes.

11/15/2023: Mozilla: Friends Don’t Get Friends These Tech Gifts, PCMag

I was going to write up the release of the 2023 edition of Mozilla’s “Privacy Not Included” anti-gift guide based on an advance look at the press release about it, then saw enough questions unanswered by that embargoed release that I decided to wait until the next morning to file. And then this nonprofit’s post announcing the guide had very little in common with the copy I’d seen before.

11/16/2023: Audience with a robot: AGI and a decentralised beneficial Singularity, Web Summit

My first panel Thursday had me interviewing one human, SingularityNet COO Janet Adams, and one non-human, that company’s talking, AI-powered robot Desdemona. I decided to test the robot’s conversational skills by asking her questions based on the Three Laws of Robotics and the Voight-Kampff Test, and she fielded them reasonably well.

11/16/2023: Raising money for robots, Web Summit

In my second panel Thursday, I interviewed Energy Robotics CEO Marc Dassler about the investment climate for robotics startups. We had fewer people show up to watch this, which I think has a great deal to do with this panel being scheduled right before a lunch break.

11/17/2023: Why Qualcomm Wants to Keep More of Your AI Offline, PCMag

I sat down with Qualcomm chief marketing officer Don McGuire Wednesday after watching one of his panels, then turned my notes from that interview into this post.

11/18/2023: Starship’s Second Flight Test Burns Bright But Not Quite Long Enough, PCMag

I assumed that jet lag would have me awake well before the scheduled launch time Saturday of SpaceX’s Starship rocket and so volunteered to write it up. I made a point of noting how much progress this incomplete test represented over April’s messier flight test and nodding to a Reuters report documenting some fairly gruesome workplace-safety issues with Starship.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/11/19/weekly-output-wireless-broadband-rises-tech-vs-trust-national-spectrum-strategy-mozilla-non-gift-guide-ai-meets-robotics-robotics-startup-fundraising-qualcomms-on-device-ai-pitch-starship-f/

Any new empirical work on the #techlash against social media platform, in the sense of increasing negative reporting? I am still puzzled that there is not more work on this. @npseaver, I remember we had a Twitter conversation on this, and there was one person mentioning their work but I cannot find it, account deleted. Any new findings? (BTW Our own work presented at #ICA22 is still not published 🙈)