What happened in 2017
avc.com
avc.com
How does someone predict a particular narrative for next 30 years?
If anything I predict people will be disillusioned trying to pump AI/ML in everything imaginable. And data collection just for the sake of collection will be looked down upon as spam. Soon we might need adblock like plugins to stop companies from trying to gain data on us.
The popular adblockers I'm aware of also block analytics calls made thru external JS (ga.js, segment.js come to mind)
You won't anymore. Predicting a particular narritive is akin to decide what will happen. The more you force the future, the more the future tries to become the past. If the future is the past, then there is no progress made. No progress made, and you have a loop.
"[Trump] is the epitome of white male dominance. An unapologetic (actually braggart) groper in chief. I think it took something as horrible as the election of such an awful human being to shock the US into deciding that we could not allow this behavior any more. Courageous women such as Susan Fowler, Ellen Pao, and many others came forward and talked publicly about their struggles with behavior that we now deem unacceptable."
I thought it was Harvey Weinstein revelations that was the turning point.
The last stat I can find on US literacy is 86% (1985). Based on anecdotal evidence I suspect "math literacy" is much lower than that (couldn't find statistics). I had other _really smart_ engineer/science friends in undergrad who struggled writing and reading code. I'm not sure how realistic this is.
Then again, there was a time when driving must have seemed too complex for the masses.
The thing I think will be a big deal in the next couple of years to come will be about trust, or more precisely trustless. It has been shown that you can trust a protocol/scheme without trusting anyone in the system. The rise of Bitcoin is the prime example of that. Or look at how Contactless discovery happens in Signal. Now imagine that happening in your spam abuse (imagine spammers can't spam due to effective rate limiting), email service (you store encrypted emails on the server you don't trust, and know when someone decrypts your mail), social networks (you can safely store your information on a social network without trusting it), responsible decryption (you can store top-secret data in your phone and not having to trust the software provider - i.e. FBI Apple iPhone case), reproducible software builds. Technologies are slowly enabling those dreams to come true. I think that trust in trustless systems is extremely important, because it enables the mass to have privacy and protection without having to resort on everyone understanding the code and more importantly, trusting the integrity (whatever that might require) of the cloud operator or of your peers. Several important papers have been published in this area. To get a grasp of what's possible, you could read "Making Decryption Accountable" by Ryan, "Private contact discovery for Signal" by moxie0.
I'm planning to do something practical with those ideas in 2018 :). Wish me luck guys.
If there is a tech backlash, I don't see how more tech is the solution.
I downloaded WeCroak, after reading an Atlantic article about it being an anti-app to remind you about your impending death, and it works as advertised. By which I mean, after reading a quote about death, I feel less inclined to pick up my phone for a couple hours!
I don't care about the writer's credentials. This article being on the front page is an embarrassment to Hacker News. Whiteness is associated with being a predator, that is, an enemy of women. Divide and conquer.
What we should worry about is this fact being used as an excuse for anti-white racism and anti-male sexism, which is exactly what is happening. People are acting like all white males are the issue when they're not. They're applauding affirmative action while ignoring the fact that white men are now a minority in universities nowadays. They sneer at men embracing their masculinity while applauding women embracing their femininity. They push for equality in high paying fields while ignoring these inequalities in lower-paying ones.
We really should reconsider our methods of facilitating change. It's a double standard, and will be met with cultural and political backlash.
We've got a few thousand years of racist history that shows us just how worried we should be about mostly white men holding power vs representative populations of those leadership groups.
> What we should worry about is this fact being used as an excuse for anti-white racism and anti-male sexism, which is exactly what is happening.
This is where you lost me. Do you have any proof that this is taking place and at which rate? At which point is the discomfort of white males OK for society given the vast injustices and imbalances created to make white males more comfortable at everyone else's expense?
Fighting racism with racism will earn you no friends. There is nothing that makes whites better than nonwhites, and there is nothing that makes nonwhites better than whites. Utilizing this us-vs-them mentality to suppress a group of people you don't like is exactly the kind of mentality that led to racism in the first place.
A big part of “We are the 99%” is, surely, the realization that less than 1% of all people have those coveted positions of power. If they followed the same distribution as the population as a whole, which they don’t, something like 61.3% of that 1% would be white, 13% would be black etc.
The distribution is heavily skewed towards white because for historic and cultural reasons it’s much easier for white people to get into that group.
> it’s not a collective group
Welcome to *ism 101. That’s when the properties of a minority are expanded to the whole group based on a trait. All white men are terrible, all black people wear saggy sweatpants, all hispanics clean toilets, and all white women want to speak to the manager Etc
Read that sentence to yourself again, slowly.
And ask yourself why, and how it affects groups who rarely have power.
Now I'm not saying life is easy for the white male. I know it's not. We all know the vast majority of white males aren't basking in wealth and power. I'm simply saying, look how exclusive the top is to those who aren't white and male, and for all the challenges the composite white male faces in navigating the world, the composite person who is not white male that has those, plus the mechanisms that filter us out the higher we rise.
I'm not asking you to cry for me. I don't need it. I wrote the above in full recognition that if you remove the white part, as a male, I'm in the in group. I try to understand the advantages I have as a guy, a heterosexual, an American, and a person who was born well off, and I try to advocate for those that don't have those advantages.
Everyone who seeks and earns power does this, even white men. If we want to be powerful, we mimic powerful people. You're conflating race and culture, which are massively different. A white hillbilly from Tennessee will have just as much trouble becoming an executive as a black man from the projects.
Both of these things are problems. The former because it suggests that equal opportunity is a myth, and the latter because criminals are getting away with sexual harassment/assault and even rape. But I don't think they're the same issue.
In my opinion, if we solved the equal opportunity problem, we'd still have to face these three problems:
1. Sexual harassment and assault are considered acceptable behavior by many males.
2. Rich people face a different justice system than poor people.
3. Women face skepticism, hostility, and sometimes reprisals when they come forward with allegations of sexual harassment/assault or rape.
I do wish people would talk about 2 more. All in all, I think it's extremely good thing for our society that women are coming forward and males who have committed sex crimes are paying for it. I just wish they were being prosecuted and not "forced to step down."