Agreed, users who don't work in tech generally lack awareness, understanding, and appreciation for the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance.

Think of it this way. Instead of a lengthy and weasely "privacy policy" suppose every web site popped up a modal dialog saying "Alert! everything you enter or click on this web site will be permanently recorded and can be shared with anyone, now or 50 years in the future: NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, Russian intelligence services, your employer, your ex-spouse, your health insurance company, your current and next landlord, local police, and anyone else we feel like, without telling you. Do you agree (Yes/No). " Then whoever clicked "Yes" would deserve the blame GP assigns to them.

I actually read the "privacy" policies. They say nothing that contradicts the preceding paragraph, but they contain only sunshine and platitudes: "your privacy is important to us." The entire industry actively hides their tracking behind vague and misleading language. I would say it's the reason "typical" users don't much care about privacy. They're being deceived into not caring.

I was backpacking in the Adirondack mountains long ago near an army base and was awakened by a sonic boom at 5 am. It sounded like a shotgun going off inside my tent. So I think one's perception of the loudness of a sonic boom depends on how far away it is.

As to why I heard a sonic boom inland in the United States, I guess that the army must have had a special exception for planned exercises over the sparsely-inhabited Adirondack Park. This was during the Cold War when air defense readiness was super important.

I would definitely be in favor of requiring national and, in the US, state authorization for autonomous vehicles to be tested on public roads. I believe the objection is that a "bureaucratic process" would "stifle innovation" and preventable deaths are a preferred alternative. Heaven forbid we let engineers use their engineering expertise to minimize loss of human life when there's a mad rush to be first to market.

The benefit of requiring licensing and government oversight is that every developer will be working to the same safety standards. Otherwise I don't see a way around the short-term financial incentive that the company who skimps on safety but gets lucky (for a while) wins the race to market.

There are many people who just want to use technology and are actively disinterested in how it works. I call this "willful ignorance." They lack the background to see how data mining could be a problem. As long as most of our legislators and regulators remain willfully ignorant, there will be no meaningful safeguards on privacy.

It's sleazy to frame this is "here is how Trump cheated at the election" because AFAIK anyone could have and would have done the same thing. But if that's what it takes to get politicians to think about privacy, bring on the sleaze.

I'm with you except for the part about the general rules underlying prejudices being usually correct. I don't believe that is a requirement for human beings to accept the rule. So I would say the "pre" in "prejudice" really means the rule doesn't get tested for accuracy or revised.

Fundamentally, thinking of deep learning as machine-generated prejudice changes one's enthusiasm for the technology.

Speaking as an employer, my perspective is that some work is parallelizable, where productivity scales approximately linearly with the number of employees assigned to it, and other work is inherently collaborative, to put it positively, or entangled in a hairball of ambiguity and unresolved dependencies, to more accurately describe how I feel about managing it. I believe the euphemism for it is "white-collar" or "professional" work. =)

The classic example of parallelizable work I've seen in management books is cleaning hotel rooms, where if you want it done in half the time "all" you have to do is double your cleaning staff. I am not sure what tech jobs are parallelizable but when I hear people grumble about how tedious web app development can be, I guess that would be the place to look.

The value of an urban work site is that it's centralized and easier *in aggregate* to get your employees physically co-located so they can collaborate. People whose work is well-defined and well-structured don't generally appreciate how valuable physical presence is to collaboration, especially across departmental boundaries. Email and Skype just don't substitute for stepping out to get a coffee with a manager from Marketing or QA -- and I say this an an introvert for whom striking up a conversation with a stranger feels as comfortable as fingernails scraping on a blackboard. I learned to do it none the less: relationships are how work professional gets done.

When you've determined (through reasoned analysis or just force of habit) that you need a collaborative workspace, an urban location has powerful benefits because there's a large talent pool willing to commute to downtown compared to the number of people willing to commute to some outlying village.

For work that's parallelizable, the costs of an office and making everyone endure the commute outweigh the benefits. It makes perfect sense to me that workers who can be productive independently should be allowed to live where they want and not spend two hours a day just getting to and from their work site.

So that's why companies (or at least my company) are willing to pay more to be located in an urban center.

"This ultimately begs the question -- how do you maintain trust in a digital-based economy when you may not be able to believe your own eyes anymore?" he asked rhetorically.

Umm, how about digital signatures?

The idea of fake news isn't new. It's been easy to print complete fabrications since Gutenberg. The real problem is uncritical consumption of "information."

Logic fail. Taking the vaccine doesn't prevent you from washing your hands, so arguing for hand-washing is not arguing against vaccine. A sensible person would do both.

I have also heard that this year's vaccine is less effective than it should be. All medication is a trade-off between risks, side effects, and benefits, and this year the benefits are falling way short. If side effects or risks are normally something you have to think about, this is a year when you may want to think twice. But if you're blessed with the privilege of not normally having to worry about taking the vaccine, it is still, as they say, "worth a shot."

What most people want from financial products is a fail-safe get-rich-quick scheme. They'll turn a blind eye to a lot of problems as long as they think they're getting rich.

I don't know about "most people," but I do think you've identified a population. As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. And I'm sure there is a legion of financial "service" firms ready to take advantage of an easy mark.