@patm and I did our demo for the Mozilla Open Leaders program! Here’s the link to our part:
Here’s what we said:
@micheleminno:
It’s urgent, we have to act now.
The damages of addictive harmful technologies are everywhere around us. We can see them in how kids are growing up: they lack in speculative reasoning, critical thinking, spoken and non-verbal language skills, body-mind coordination. Glued to their phones, they basically lack meaningful empathic real world interactions and experiences.
Tech companies are making money redirecting our attention, attracting and distracting us to their time and happiness consuming apps. They leverage the most advanced AI and neuroscience in order to extract our own private behavioral data and resell them as aggregated comprehensive profiles. And all this happening in the vacuum of public opinion sensibility and knowledge, with no proper regulations by both national and international authorities.
We don’t want to focus on the negative side though.
We aim to be the reference point - gathering people and partners worldwide - for creative awareness campaigns about the harms of those addictive apps and technologies, but - most of all - proposing and guiding to solutions: new apps coming with a humane purpose and design, aligned with our own needs and long term aspirations, evaluated by us for what they bring into our lives.
@patmatsu:
Michele Minno and I are moderators for the Humane Tech Community and members of its community team, a group that decides on policy and content matters.
The Humane Tech Community—or HTC as we call it—consists of about twenty-five hundred members from many walks of life: medicine, entertainment, science, business, education, the arts, and so on. It was founded a year ago by the Center for Humane Technology. We are concerned about the interference of big tech companies in the everyday choices we make.
The community team is organizing the membership to carry out public awareness campaigns that address such dangers. For us, this is an issue that involves human rights, freedoms, and autonomy.
Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism urges us to act with conviction and clarity.
By working together, we can respond to mass surveillance, privacy invasion, addicting behaviors, polarizing, and other harms. Our collective wisdom is greater than the sum of our individual knowledge.
We can create a future in which human potential is not exploited but nurtured. Please work with us at HTC!
