Let's not let old arguments about 'technology creating unemployment' be a smokescreen for the real issues
[..] Ironically, some of the workers say that they are made to feel like robots.
It is the responsibility of the large corporations to ensure that the companies making their electronics abide by similar practices as in their home countries. And it is the responsibility of all of us not to buy goods made by workers who are stripped of their rights and dignity.
the reason Apple assembles iPhones and iPads in China instead of America, is that assembling them here or Europe would cost much, much more — even with shipping and transportation. And it would cost much, much more because, in the United States and Europe, we have established minimum acceptable standards for the treatment and pay of workers like those who build the iPhones and iPads.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records
"Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache," said Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou at a recent year-end party, adding that he wants to learn from Chin Shih-chien, director of Taipei Zoo, regarding how animals should be managed.
These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them – or to a particular one we don’t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.
as housing prices rise in the San Francisco Bay Area, angry activists are targeting those shuttles to protest the region's gentrification.
"We want the ruling class, which is becoming the tech class, to listen to our voices and listen to the voices of folks that are being displaced," said one SF protester.
Le pouvoir politique subit une pression croissante exercée par le lobbying numérico-industriel, lui faisant miroiter une fluidification et une optimisation de la vie grâce à ses systèmes de rationalisation computationnelle, déjà à l’œuvre dans les programmes de l’Open data ou des smart cities. Face à la démission du politique, c’est une politisation de ces enjeux par toutes les forces de la société qui s’impose aujourd’hui.
When we’re told what the future will look like, we always see the version where everyone lives like Minority Report’s John Anderton. Played by Tom Cruise, Anderton is a wealthy police chief, the kind of person who can afford a summer house on the lake or the newest Lexus model. But unfortunately, if the future is anything like the present, his will only be one side of the story.
Google, Apple and Facebook are highly profitable and look likely to remain so. Still, a New Yorker looking up at the Pan Am, Chrysler and General Motors buildings might recall, wistfully, that the same must once have been said of those fallen titans, too.
The iOS terms clearly state that Apple will record what you say and may send it to subsidiaries and their agents. It goes on to add that they will record the names of your contacts, your relationships with them, in-home devices, and sometimes your location.
President Obama said he would support measures opening backdoors in communications and social media technologies last January.
Such measures would force companies like Apple and Google to create holes in their programming that would let the government track suspected criminals or terrorists.
“Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said in a Jan. 16 press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on cybersecurity.
Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products.
“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”