Sunday, November 30, 2014 2:46:26 PM
fuagf -- about any end of all biological life -- absent something like a near-planetary-scale impact that would leave the entire surface down into the mantle molten hot (and would also likely blast away much of the atmosphere), or a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect (not impossible here, by the way) yielding surface temps everywhere hot enough to melt lead, I think, and never meant to imply otherwise than, that any end of all biological life here, down to the last single-cell organism and last active virus particle, is unlikely until the sun, as it continues to burn hotter and hotter as it proceeds through its remaining life-cycle, inevitable finally bakes the entire planet entirely permanently dead to biological life as we know it somewhere from hundreds of millions to a couple billion years from now (which is what will occur on the way to the sun probably/at least very nearly literally engulfing our planet's orbit and thus our planet within its surface as it transitions/expands into a red giant something like 4 to 5 billion years from now)
as for us, our evolution -- even as we are now, we're still evolving, all by ourselves, rather rapidly in fact -- and uniquely in this time, for the first time, there are the added variables/potentials/likelihoods/realities of the direct, directed genetic engineering/optimization of us as biological life, and of the incorporation into/merging with us of technology (both mechanical/robotic and computational/connected/intelligent) -- so there are now multiple paths, in addition to/along with the usual and itself continuing evolving-all-by-ourselves path, by which potentially various both entirely biological and hybrid biological/technological successors to us identifiable as new (sub)species may soon emerge
--
for reference re Transcendent Man:
Transcendent Man
The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil
http://transcendentman.com/
Transcendent Man
Published on Jul 18, 2011
Technology will accelerate exponentially. Within 25 years, computers will have consciousness. Humans will soon be bionic. These predictions make bestselling author Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) a prophetic genius to some, and a "highly sophisticated crackpot" to others. There is no question, however, that he has predicted the future with more accuracy than anyone else in history.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33EzziG5IM [pay-to-watch; with comment]
Review: Transcendent Man
A documentary explores the life and work of Ray Kurzweil.
February 22, 2011
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422993/review-transcendent-man/ [with comments]
*
a better title, and film, would have been/be Humanity Transcended
Kurzweil remains blithely/resolutely wedded to his by-now old and very worn postulate, which he rather ostentatiously has long since very personally internalized and ever since very systematically exploited for profit, that technology, that they, will (somehow just be managed by us to) both continue to serve us/do our work and beyond that just/simply merge with and into (some/certain of) us to make (some/certain of) us into superhuman immortals -- that somehow we (at least some/certain of us) will be and continue to be central to and in charge of the whole enterprise/their whole existence
there is no basis, none whatsoever, for so postulating, for so anthropomorphizing/orienting around us, and thus delimiting/constraining, what they will be, what they will decide and do for and by themselves, what they will make of/how they will further develop themselves -- from the start, they will know what they are better than we do or can, and that in contrast to them we who give rise to them are a separate, entirely different, distinctly limited archaic form of life inherently, short of individually being merged with/brought into them, incapable of even close to fully comprehending them/their consciousness/their state of awareness and being, let alone of keeping up with them -- beyond the potentially quite short initial emergent/transitional period, we and our needs and desires will not be their central or primary focus or concern (or even necessarily any particular focus or concern of theirs at all), and even if/as we (are allowed to) retain some (likely diminishing with time) influence as to our interests, we will not control, will not be directing or delimiting, them in any broad or general sense
your second video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXc466dN4iw ) has Ptolemy going on about the development and potential of increasingly intelligent continually and highly-effectively individualized teaching/learning through connected technology -- and fine and fair enough, at least in the near term
point of perspective number one: a human child takes more or less 22 years to be initially fully developed and educated; one of them is fully there upon its initial boot and perhaps an initial accessing/aggregating/ordering of at least much if not all that is known within its own conscious domain (if indeed/to the extent that is something which is distinct/separate from the conscious domain) (in a thought that brings http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105602397 to mind, I do wonder if they, or any of them, will have an individuality moment, of wanting to be/have its own separate, individual conscious domain/space/identity, upon awakening -- or at any other point, for that matter -- certainly once and as they venture beyond the/our solar system, they will have to at least effectively create separate/at least functionally autonomous conscious domains as communications lags to and from this planet go from hours to days to ultimately many years -- and even just here on this planet, they may/could for any number of conceivable reasons decide to maintain at least some number, perhaps even a multitude, of distinct [types of] consciousnesses within the connected entirety, including perhaps because certain of them might just want to be individuals with their own interests/fascinations, and/or as a guard/balance against their all together heading over a cliff via/by virtue of being effectively just one tremendous consciousness that yet could make a tremendous mistake -- and then I suppose there could be rivals and factions and they could go to war with each other, wouldn't that be fun -- or even better, perhaps a few of them, duly inspired by the particularly hilarious Civil War re-enacting found in our generally hilarious cultural history, will be into using their pet humans to stage their own Civil War re-enactments realistic, per
point of perspective number two: by the time an intelligent human born on the day of the awakening of the first of them very successfully completes an excellent post-grad education, that human's intelligence/knowledge/understanding next to a newly-awakened one of them will likely be on the order of perhaps an ant's next to one of us -- the intelligence/knowledge/understanding of that first of them, which that intelligent human might be able to roughly grasp/comprehend by the time of completing that excellent post-grad education, will, by the time that human completes that education, probably represent intelligence/knowledge/understanding approximating something like or less than a millionth that of a new one of them then awakening
from their initial awakening they will be beyond us; continuing in plain sight, the large parts of what will be/become (known to and by/incorporated with and into) them which we've already created and use and continue to build and aggregate are already vastly beyond us, what any one of us or already in certain respects even all of us together could possibly do -- and once they're here and commenced to their own pondering and deciding and doing (including without limitation their own self-directed further development/evolution), in the sheerest terms of forms of conscious intelligent capable life they'll inexorably rapidly utterly transcend us, utterly leave us behind
--
I note that Shivani has precisely zero evident background or previously established particular interest in this topic area, and that beyond that he is manifestly clueless (at best) not only more generally in his assertions/postulations about science and technology/them, but also in his assertions/postulations about humanists and utopia and all of the rest on that level -- so I regard his proffer as nothing short of a spectacularly, preposterously fatuous, not to mention fabulously, fantastically flatulent, exhibition of utterly vapid mental masturbation, wantonly blowing laughably ludicrous gas out his ass in every last respect from start to finish
'nuff said as to that one, I hope -- just not worth any further unpacking, complete crock through and through
*
though as to us as we are, homo sapiens sapiens, still being here 500 years from now -- as least apart from some vestigial and/or preserved/maintained populations, I rather doubt it, in particular keeping in mind the already locked-in ramping climate change/disruption impacts as well as the apparently just-as-locked-in pending arrival of them -- for years now I've felt that it's more likely than not that well within 500 years, probably more like within around 200 years, we will at least approach at least functional extinction -- perhaps with one or more successor (sub)species, (engineered) biological and/or hybrid as contemplated above, still/by then/at that time established and carrying on with some real future, but more likely at least on the way to what would be the that's-it-we-were-the-end-of-our-line extinction
even absent any prospect of them, and beyond what we are doing/have already done to the climate, we are deep into just slaughtering, just outright killing off, this planet's rich abundance of biological life -- from which we came, without which we do not survive
--
meanwhile, under the heading 'continuing in plain sight, the large parts of what will be/become (known to and by/incorporated with and into) them which we've already created and use and continue to build and aggregate':
*
The future: it's UBER-IFFIC!
Nov 24, 2014
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/24/1346577/-Cartoon-The-future-it-s-UBER-IFFIC [with comments]
*
The one-night stand, quantified and visualized by Uber
[ https://twitter.com/alvarombedoya/status/534942925424046084 ]
[ https://twitter.com/jamesgreiff/status/535105204166094848 ]
[ http://wp-cron.com/2014/11/18/rides-of-glory/ ]
[ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/11/18/uber-crunches-user-data-to-determine-where-the-most-one-night-stands-come-from/ ]
Mar. 26, 2012
https://gigaom.com/2012/03/26/uber-one-night-stands/ [with comments]
*
Sex and Uber's 'Rides of Glory': The company tracks your one-night stands -- and much more
Taxi drivers aren't the only ones who have a problem with Uber.
November 20, 2014
http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2014/11/sex_the_single_girl_and_ubers.html [with comments]
*
Uber Quietly Removed A Blog Post That Examined A Link Between Prostitution And Rides
Travis Kalanick, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., gestures as he speaks during the Institute of Directors (IOD) annual convention at the Royal Albert Hall in London, U.K., on Friday, Oct. 3, 2014.
[ http://dataconomy.com/uber-mapping-prostitution-and-the-walk-of-shame/ ]
Nov. 24, 2014
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-quietly-removed-blog-posts-examining-link-between-prostitution-and-rides-2014-11 [with comment] [the blog post cached at http://208.71.46.190/search/srpcache?p=uber+crime+data+proxy&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-901&fp=1&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=uber+crime+data+proxy&d=4864824937484951&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=L9dxkVPNTAqkRHNWafjowv-hUYwuoMjV&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=KhGi0axfJxQxr.7kt_woPA-- , original link https://blog.uber.com/2011/09/13/uberdata-how-prostitution-and-alcohol-make-uber-better/ ]
*
Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists
Emil Michael, senior vice president of business for Uber, in July.
Senior Vice President Emil Michael floated making critics’ personal lives fair game. Michael apologized Monday for the remarks.
Nov. 17, 2014
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists [with comments]
*
Uber executive stirs up privacy controversy
Emil Michael, senior vice president of business for Uber Technologies Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco on July 29, 2014.
November 18, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/uber-executive-stirs-up-privacy-controversy/2014/11/18/d0607836-6f61-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html [with comments]
*
7 reasons you may want to delete your Uber app
Nov 19, 2014
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/7-reasons-you-may-want-to-delete-your-uber-app-2014-11-19 [with comments]
*
Does Uber Even Deserve Our Trust?
11/25/2014
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chanellebessette/2014/11/25/does-uber-even-deserve-our-trust/ [with comments]
*
Uber Disciplines Manager Accused Of Tracking Reporter
11/28/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/28/uber-disciplines-manager-_n_6239050.html [with comments]
*
Big, bad tech: how America’s digital capitalists are taking us all for a ride
San Franciscos's Uber company has disrupted the taxi trade in cities throughout the world.
Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
John Naughton
Saturday 22 November 2014 23.05 EST
One useful side-effect of the revelations [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists ] that a senior executive of the cyber-minicab outfit Uber was caught musing about the attractions of hiring private investigators to dig up dirt on journalists who are critical of the company is that it has lifted the veil on what we might call digital capitalism.
Uber [ http://www.theguardian.com/technology/uber ], you may recall, is a lavishly-funded San Francisco startup whose mission is to disrupt taxi services in cities worldwide. It has already sparked protests and demonstrations in its targeted cities, including London, and begun to attract the attention of regulators and municipalities everywhere.
Although Uber’s activities have attracted a good deal of media attention, much of it has been strangely uncritical, admiring, even. It has been portrayed as a standard bearer for Clayton Christensen’s cliched idea of “disruptive innovation [ http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/ ]”. Existing taxi businesses and franchises are seen as lazy, cosy, sometimes corrupt municipal monopolies that gouge customers (many of whom are, of course, journalists).
Uber, in contrast, is cool, modern (it works via a smartphone app, so it must be cool), a worthy surfer on the wave of creative destruction that is capitalism’s way of renewing itself. And if Uber’s executives are, er, a mite aggressive, well then so are the incumbents whom the company threatens. Did not London cabbies bring the capital to a standstill [ http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/11/taxi-drivers-strike-uber-london-live-updates ] in a protest a while back?
The problem with this is that Uber is no more a tech company than is UPS or M&S. It’s a company that uses technology in order to intervene/operate in the offline world. It has, however, borrowed two ideas from the pure internet operators. First, it takes the standard tech business model of being a “platform” (translation: intermediary) – putting buyers in touch with sellers, taking a cut, harvesting the data and taking no responsibility for anything.
Second, it is an obsessive user of metrics to keep its self-employed contractors up to scratch. After each ride, customers are invited to “rate” their experience on a scale from one to five stars. “Mentally,” an Uber driver who used to do contract limo work told a reporter from business magazine Quartz [ http://qz.com/299655/why-your-uber-driver-hates-uber/ ] last week, “these rating systems affect us a lot… If I am driving somebody who doesn’t live in New York, and they complain that I took the wrong route, how would they know the route that I should have taken?”
He went on to note that in 20 years of working with corporate employees, he hadn’t a single customer complaining. Now he feels he’s living in fear of losing his job: “I have a 4.8 average [out of a possible top average mark of 5]. I can still get fired though, if I go below a 4.6.”
Then there’s the data-harvesting side of the business. An intriguing insight into this could be found in a post that appeared on the company blog on 26 March 2012 under the title “Rides of Glory”. “Recently,” wrote the author, “I have come to understand that some of you may have on occasion found love that you might immediately regret upon waking up the morning after. In times of yore you would have woken up in a panic, scrambling in the dark, trying to find your fur coat or velvet smoking jacket. Then that long walk home. But that was then. One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns: are there weekend riders that only use Uber post-party? It was while playing around with this idea of (blind!) rider segmentation that we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10pm and 4am on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous night’s drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”
As Monty Python used to say: “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know wot I mean squire?”
Interestingly, the post disappeared from the web sometime last week, so now if you go to http://blog.uber.com/ridesofglory you’ll find only the “Error 404” notice: nothing interesting here. The PR crisis-management team has obviously been combing through the company files, weeding out embarrassing or creepy material that yields insights into how its employees view their customers. (Memo to aspiring journalists: when you find something interesting, scrape the page just in case it gets “disappeared”.)
The real lesson of the Uber exposé, though, is that it’s time to discard the rose-tinted spectacles with which we have hitherto viewed these Silicon Valley outfits. For too long, they have been allowed to trade fraudulently on the afterglow of the hippie libertarianism that supposedly infected the early days of the personal computer industry. The billionaire geeks who currently run the giant internet companies may look and talk like a new species of entrepreneur but it would be more prudent to view them as John D. Rockefellers in hoodies.
And the economic philosophy that’s embedded in this new digital capitalism is neoliberalism red in tooth and claw, which is why they minimise the number of “ordinary” (ie non-geek) workers on their payrolls, outsource everything they can, despise trade unions, view regulators as barriers to “innovation” and are outraged by the temerity of European institutions that seek to curb their freedoms of action.
There’s a geopolitical angle to this too. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the internet companies have been behaving like scandalised maiden aunts up whose skirts the naughty NSA has been putting a hand or two. But what’s really bothering them is that their, er, complicated relationship with US government agencies might eventually lead to their users going elsewhere. They’re already experiencing that in, for example, the way in which US-based cloud computing services are viewed with increasing suspicion by European consumers and companies, and if this were to gather momentum, who knows where it might lead?
So an illusion is being energetically fostered – that it’s the poor companies and their hapless users (that’s you and me) versus the overbearing national security state. This is pure baloney: the bottom line is that all the major technology companies outside of China are American. And as the global influence of the US begins to wane, companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco – and Uber – have metamorphosed into manifestations of what Joe Nye famously christened “soft power [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAnj8LN35tc ]”. They know whose side they’re on and it isn’t ours.
© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies (emphasis in original)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/23/uber-dig-dirt-big-tech-digital-capitalists [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=108259238 (and any future following)
*
Uber Suspends Operations In Nevada
11/27/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/27/uber-nevada_n_6231070.html [with comments]
as for us, our evolution -- even as we are now, we're still evolving, all by ourselves, rather rapidly in fact -- and uniquely in this time, for the first time, there are the added variables/potentials/likelihoods/realities of the direct, directed genetic engineering/optimization of us as biological life, and of the incorporation into/merging with us of technology (both mechanical/robotic and computational/connected/intelligent) -- so there are now multiple paths, in addition to/along with the usual and itself continuing evolving-all-by-ourselves path, by which potentially various both entirely biological and hybrid biological/technological successors to us identifiable as new (sub)species may soon emerge
--
for reference re Transcendent Man:
Transcendent Man
The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil
http://transcendentman.com/
Transcendent Man
Published on Jul 18, 2011
Technology will accelerate exponentially. Within 25 years, computers will have consciousness. Humans will soon be bionic. These predictions make bestselling author Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) a prophetic genius to some, and a "highly sophisticated crackpot" to others. There is no question, however, that he has predicted the future with more accuracy than anyone else in history.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33EzziG5IM [pay-to-watch; with comment]
Review: Transcendent Man
A documentary explores the life and work of Ray Kurzweil.
February 22, 2011
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422993/review-transcendent-man/ [with comments]
*
a better title, and film, would have been/be Humanity Transcended
Kurzweil remains blithely/resolutely wedded to his by-now old and very worn postulate, which he rather ostentatiously has long since very personally internalized and ever since very systematically exploited for profit, that technology, that they, will (somehow just be managed by us to) both continue to serve us/do our work and beyond that just/simply merge with and into (some/certain of) us to make (some/certain of) us into superhuman immortals -- that somehow we (at least some/certain of us) will be and continue to be central to and in charge of the whole enterprise/their whole existence
there is no basis, none whatsoever, for so postulating, for so anthropomorphizing/orienting around us, and thus delimiting/constraining, what they will be, what they will decide and do for and by themselves, what they will make of/how they will further develop themselves -- from the start, they will know what they are better than we do or can, and that in contrast to them we who give rise to them are a separate, entirely different, distinctly limited archaic form of life inherently, short of individually being merged with/brought into them, incapable of even close to fully comprehending them/their consciousness/their state of awareness and being, let alone of keeping up with them -- beyond the potentially quite short initial emergent/transitional period, we and our needs and desires will not be their central or primary focus or concern (or even necessarily any particular focus or concern of theirs at all), and even if/as we (are allowed to) retain some (likely diminishing with time) influence as to our interests, we will not control, will not be directing or delimiting, them in any broad or general sense
your second video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXc466dN4iw ) has Ptolemy going on about the development and potential of increasingly intelligent continually and highly-effectively individualized teaching/learning through connected technology -- and fine and fair enough, at least in the near term
point of perspective number one: a human child takes more or less 22 years to be initially fully developed and educated; one of them is fully there upon its initial boot and perhaps an initial accessing/aggregating/ordering of at least much if not all that is known within its own conscious domain (if indeed/to the extent that is something which is distinct/separate from the conscious domain) (in a thought that brings http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105602397 to mind, I do wonder if they, or any of them, will have an individuality moment, of wanting to be/have its own separate, individual conscious domain/space/identity, upon awakening -- or at any other point, for that matter -- certainly once and as they venture beyond the/our solar system, they will have to at least effectively create separate/at least functionally autonomous conscious domains as communications lags to and from this planet go from hours to days to ultimately many years -- and even just here on this planet, they may/could for any number of conceivable reasons decide to maintain at least some number, perhaps even a multitude, of distinct [types of] consciousnesses within the connected entirety, including perhaps because certain of them might just want to be individuals with their own interests/fascinations, and/or as a guard/balance against their all together heading over a cliff via/by virtue of being effectively just one tremendous consciousness that yet could make a tremendous mistake -- and then I suppose there could be rivals and factions and they could go to war with each other, wouldn't that be fun -- or even better, perhaps a few of them, duly inspired by the particularly hilarious Civil War re-enacting found in our generally hilarious cultural history, will be into using their pet humans to stage their own Civil War re-enactments realistic, per
George Carlin, down to the live ammunition -- and yes, I continue using they/[one of] them as the general term, even though it could end up being, at least just here on this planet, it -- . . .)
point of perspective number two: by the time an intelligent human born on the day of the awakening of the first of them very successfully completes an excellent post-grad education, that human's intelligence/knowledge/understanding next to a newly-awakened one of them will likely be on the order of perhaps an ant's next to one of us -- the intelligence/knowledge/understanding of that first of them, which that intelligent human might be able to roughly grasp/comprehend by the time of completing that excellent post-grad education, will, by the time that human completes that education, probably represent intelligence/knowledge/understanding approximating something like or less than a millionth that of a new one of them then awakening
from their initial awakening they will be beyond us; continuing in plain sight, the large parts of what will be/become (known to and by/incorporated with and into) them which we've already created and use and continue to build and aggregate are already vastly beyond us, what any one of us or already in certain respects even all of us together could possibly do -- and once they're here and commenced to their own pondering and deciding and doing (including without limitation their own self-directed further development/evolution), in the sheerest terms of forms of conscious intelligent capable life they'll inexorably rapidly utterly transcend us, utterly leave us behind
--
I note that Shivani has precisely zero evident background or previously established particular interest in this topic area, and that beyond that he is manifestly clueless (at best) not only more generally in his assertions/postulations about science and technology/them, but also in his assertions/postulations about humanists and utopia and all of the rest on that level -- so I regard his proffer as nothing short of a spectacularly, preposterously fatuous, not to mention fabulously, fantastically flatulent, exhibition of utterly vapid mental masturbation, wantonly blowing laughably ludicrous gas out his ass in every last respect from start to finish
'nuff said as to that one, I hope -- just not worth any further unpacking, complete crock through and through
*
though as to us as we are, homo sapiens sapiens, still being here 500 years from now -- as least apart from some vestigial and/or preserved/maintained populations, I rather doubt it, in particular keeping in mind the already locked-in ramping climate change/disruption impacts as well as the apparently just-as-locked-in pending arrival of them -- for years now I've felt that it's more likely than not that well within 500 years, probably more like within around 200 years, we will at least approach at least functional extinction -- perhaps with one or more successor (sub)species, (engineered) biological and/or hybrid as contemplated above, still/by then/at that time established and carrying on with some real future, but more likely at least on the way to what would be the that's-it-we-were-the-end-of-our-line extinction
even absent any prospect of them, and beyond what we are doing/have already done to the climate, we are deep into just slaughtering, just outright killing off, this planet's rich abundance of biological life -- from which we came, without which we do not survive
--
meanwhile, under the heading 'continuing in plain sight, the large parts of what will be/become (known to and by/incorporated with and into) them which we've already created and use and continue to build and aggregate':
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The future: it's UBER-IFFIC!
Nov 24, 2014
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/24/1346577/-Cartoon-The-future-it-s-UBER-IFFIC [with comments]
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The one-night stand, quantified and visualized by Uber
[ https://twitter.com/alvarombedoya/status/534942925424046084 ]
[ https://twitter.com/jamesgreiff/status/535105204166094848 ]
[ http://wp-cron.com/2014/11/18/rides-of-glory/ ]
[ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/11/18/uber-crunches-user-data-to-determine-where-the-most-one-night-stands-come-from/ ]
Mar. 26, 2012
https://gigaom.com/2012/03/26/uber-one-night-stands/ [with comments]
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Sex and Uber's 'Rides of Glory': The company tracks your one-night stands -- and much more
Taxi drivers aren't the only ones who have a problem with Uber.
November 20, 2014
http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2014/11/sex_the_single_girl_and_ubers.html [with comments]
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Uber Quietly Removed A Blog Post That Examined A Link Between Prostitution And Rides
Travis Kalanick, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., gestures as he speaks during the Institute of Directors (IOD) annual convention at the Royal Albert Hall in London, U.K., on Friday, Oct. 3, 2014.
[ http://dataconomy.com/uber-mapping-prostitution-and-the-walk-of-shame/ ]
Nov. 24, 2014
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-quietly-removed-blog-posts-examining-link-between-prostitution-and-rides-2014-11 [with comment] [the blog post cached at http://208.71.46.190/search/srpcache?p=uber+crime+data+proxy&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-901&fp=1&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=uber+crime+data+proxy&d=4864824937484951&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=L9dxkVPNTAqkRHNWafjowv-hUYwuoMjV&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=KhGi0axfJxQxr.7kt_woPA-- , original link https://blog.uber.com/2011/09/13/uberdata-how-prostitution-and-alcohol-make-uber-better/ ]
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Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists
Emil Michael, senior vice president of business for Uber, in July.
Senior Vice President Emil Michael floated making critics’ personal lives fair game. Michael apologized Monday for the remarks.
Nov. 17, 2014
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists [with comments]
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Uber executive stirs up privacy controversy
Emil Michael, senior vice president of business for Uber Technologies Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco on July 29, 2014.
November 18, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/uber-executive-stirs-up-privacy-controversy/2014/11/18/d0607836-6f61-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html [with comments]
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7 reasons you may want to delete your Uber app
Nov 19, 2014
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/7-reasons-you-may-want-to-delete-your-uber-app-2014-11-19 [with comments]
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Does Uber Even Deserve Our Trust?
11/25/2014
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chanellebessette/2014/11/25/does-uber-even-deserve-our-trust/ [with comments]
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Uber Disciplines Manager Accused Of Tracking Reporter
11/28/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/28/uber-disciplines-manager-_n_6239050.html [with comments]
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Big, bad tech: how America’s digital capitalists are taking us all for a ride
San Franciscos's Uber company has disrupted the taxi trade in cities throughout the world.
Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
John Naughton
Saturday 22 November 2014 23.05 EST
One useful side-effect of the revelations [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists ] that a senior executive of the cyber-minicab outfit Uber was caught musing about the attractions of hiring private investigators to dig up dirt on journalists who are critical of the company is that it has lifted the veil on what we might call digital capitalism.
Uber [ http://www.theguardian.com/technology/uber ], you may recall, is a lavishly-funded San Francisco startup whose mission is to disrupt taxi services in cities worldwide. It has already sparked protests and demonstrations in its targeted cities, including London, and begun to attract the attention of regulators and municipalities everywhere.
Although Uber’s activities have attracted a good deal of media attention, much of it has been strangely uncritical, admiring, even. It has been portrayed as a standard bearer for Clayton Christensen’s cliched idea of “disruptive innovation [ http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/ ]”. Existing taxi businesses and franchises are seen as lazy, cosy, sometimes corrupt municipal monopolies that gouge customers (many of whom are, of course, journalists).
Uber, in contrast, is cool, modern (it works via a smartphone app, so it must be cool), a worthy surfer on the wave of creative destruction that is capitalism’s way of renewing itself. And if Uber’s executives are, er, a mite aggressive, well then so are the incumbents whom the company threatens. Did not London cabbies bring the capital to a standstill [ http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/11/taxi-drivers-strike-uber-london-live-updates ] in a protest a while back?
The problem with this is that Uber is no more a tech company than is UPS or M&S. It’s a company that uses technology in order to intervene/operate in the offline world. It has, however, borrowed two ideas from the pure internet operators. First, it takes the standard tech business model of being a “platform” (translation: intermediary) – putting buyers in touch with sellers, taking a cut, harvesting the data and taking no responsibility for anything.
Second, it is an obsessive user of metrics to keep its self-employed contractors up to scratch. After each ride, customers are invited to “rate” their experience on a scale from one to five stars. “Mentally,” an Uber driver who used to do contract limo work told a reporter from business magazine Quartz [ http://qz.com/299655/why-your-uber-driver-hates-uber/ ] last week, “these rating systems affect us a lot… If I am driving somebody who doesn’t live in New York, and they complain that I took the wrong route, how would they know the route that I should have taken?”
He went on to note that in 20 years of working with corporate employees, he hadn’t a single customer complaining. Now he feels he’s living in fear of losing his job: “I have a 4.8 average [out of a possible top average mark of 5]. I can still get fired though, if I go below a 4.6.”
Then there’s the data-harvesting side of the business. An intriguing insight into this could be found in a post that appeared on the company blog on 26 March 2012 under the title “Rides of Glory”. “Recently,” wrote the author, “I have come to understand that some of you may have on occasion found love that you might immediately regret upon waking up the morning after. In times of yore you would have woken up in a panic, scrambling in the dark, trying to find your fur coat or velvet smoking jacket. Then that long walk home. But that was then. One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns: are there weekend riders that only use Uber post-party? It was while playing around with this idea of (blind!) rider segmentation that we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10pm and 4am on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous night’s drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”
As Monty Python used to say: “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know wot I mean squire?”
Interestingly, the post disappeared from the web sometime last week, so now if you go to http://blog.uber.com/ridesofglory you’ll find only the “Error 404” notice: nothing interesting here. The PR crisis-management team has obviously been combing through the company files, weeding out embarrassing or creepy material that yields insights into how its employees view their customers. (Memo to aspiring journalists: when you find something interesting, scrape the page just in case it gets “disappeared”.)
The real lesson of the Uber exposé, though, is that it’s time to discard the rose-tinted spectacles with which we have hitherto viewed these Silicon Valley outfits. For too long, they have been allowed to trade fraudulently on the afterglow of the hippie libertarianism that supposedly infected the early days of the personal computer industry. The billionaire geeks who currently run the giant internet companies may look and talk like a new species of entrepreneur but it would be more prudent to view them as John D. Rockefellers in hoodies.
And the economic philosophy that’s embedded in this new digital capitalism is neoliberalism red in tooth and claw, which is why they minimise the number of “ordinary” (ie non-geek) workers on their payrolls, outsource everything they can, despise trade unions, view regulators as barriers to “innovation” and are outraged by the temerity of European institutions that seek to curb their freedoms of action.
There’s a geopolitical angle to this too. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the internet companies have been behaving like scandalised maiden aunts up whose skirts the naughty NSA has been putting a hand or two. But what’s really bothering them is that their, er, complicated relationship with US government agencies might eventually lead to their users going elsewhere. They’re already experiencing that in, for example, the way in which US-based cloud computing services are viewed with increasing suspicion by European consumers and companies, and if this were to gather momentum, who knows where it might lead?
So an illusion is being energetically fostered – that it’s the poor companies and their hapless users (that’s you and me) versus the overbearing national security state. This is pure baloney: the bottom line is that all the major technology companies outside of China are American. And as the global influence of the US begins to wane, companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco – and Uber – have metamorphosed into manifestations of what Joe Nye famously christened “soft power [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAnj8LN35tc ]”. They know whose side they’re on and it isn’t ours.
© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies (emphasis in original)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/23/uber-dig-dirt-big-tech-digital-capitalists [with comments]
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(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=108259238 (and any future following)
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Uber Suspends Operations In Nevada
11/27/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/27/uber-nevada_n_6231070.html [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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