“
I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.
”
”
Jess C. Scott (New Order)
“
Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
”
”
Piero Scaruffi
“
Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other.
Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.
The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger.
”
”
Ernst Jünger (The Glass Bees)
“
Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
“
Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.
The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.
The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.
”
”
Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget)
“
It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.
”
”
Marshall McLuhan (The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion)
“
One of the great challenges in healthcare technology is that medicine is at once an enormous business and an exquisitely human endeavor; it requires the ruthless efficiency of the modern manufacturing plant and the gentle hand-holding of the parish priest; it is about science, but also about art; it is eminently quantifiable and yet stubbornly not.
”
”
Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
“
Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the 'dying role' and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life's most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of people's lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
The placebo effect has an evil twin known as the nocebo effect. This is when the expectation of harm or pain becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, even in the absence of any known physical effect. One candidate for the nocebo effect is the discomfort some people report experiencing after using mobile phones. Scientists have failed to identify a physical cause, so it's possible the adverse effects are caused by negative beliefs about the technology.
”
”
Christian Jarrett (30-Second Psychology: The 50 Most Thought-Provoking Psychology Theories, Each Explained In Half A Minute)
“
In particular, he believes that always-on technologies such as email, mobile phones and Facebook can be harmful if we don’t learn how to control their effects on us.
”
”
Jo Marchant (Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind over Body)
“
Starting now and lasting until forever, your health and healthcare will be determined, to a remarkable and somewhat disquieting degree, by how well the technology works.
”
”
Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
“
The obvious point of Conrad’s cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.
”
”
Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity)
“
How will I meet the young woman who is struggling to find her sense of self, or the elder who is befuddled by the rapidly changing technology that exists in the modern world? How do I meet the man with political views that oppose mine, or the person with ideological views that create and promote division? Could I show up in those moments with self-love and compassion? Compassion can be hard to find when we feel that we’ve been wronged or when we see harmful and destructive actions playing out before us. Would I become more loving and compassionate if I truly believed that I was the imagined other?
”
”
Sherri Mitchell (Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change)
“
Social media giants need to stop pretending they are changing the world, making it a better place and come forward and admit that they are deliberately selling a product that is, in fact, addictive and harmful for us.
”
”
Orge Castellano
“
The modern proliferation of porn consumption, in short, has escalated both conflict between the sexes and the harms of female-female competition. The technology behind porn is modern. The sexual psychology it exploits is evolutionary ancient.
”
”
David M. Buss (When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault)
“
What is the most helpful thing we can do for the earth and her people, Kuan Yin?”
“Kuan Yin is changing shape in response to your question, Hope. I’m not sure what this particular shape-shifting means, if it is an answer in itself or if she is adjusting to the question” Lena contemplates. “I’ll just watch for a moment and try to understand.”
“Loving people is the most helpful thing anyone can do,” Kuan Yin answers after a short while. “Your society has the resources, at this very moment, to fashion industries and lifestyles conducive to a non-harmful environment. There is a popular belief that over-population is the threat to the earth’s environment. However, for many places upon the earth it is also very much a question of resource availability and distribution. There is a real need for creating a holistic infrastructure that can support everyone.
A helpful mindset is simple-living and high-thinking”, continues Kuan Yin. “Science is constantly evolving. There are now recyclable batteries, ink cartridges, etc. Keep up to date on the latest technologies. Be aware, set examples and create trends that will positively influence people’s lives and the environment. As I said earlier, however, this is also a discussion about love and developing a greater capacity to love. It can help everyone.
We’re all one huge family, a great continuum. Don’t underestimate the power of the love created in your homes and families. This love has an immense potency, the power to influence others lives in a positive way.
”
”
Hope Bradford (Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin)
“
And this doesn’t just mean taking physical risks. The science shows that other risks—emotional, intellectual, creative, social—work just as well. “To reach flow,” explains psychiatrist Ned Hallowell,22 “one must be willing to take risks. The lover must be willing to risk rejection to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state. The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person—you and me—must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.
”
”
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
“
MR. McCULLOUGH: If you look at the brain of somebody who has just been harmed by someone—they’ve been ridiculed or harassed or insulted—we can put those people into technology that allows us to see what their brains are doing, right? So we can look at sort of what your brain looks like on revenge. It looks exactly like the brain of somebody who is thirsty and is just about to get a sweet drink to drink or somebody who’s hungry who’s about to get a piece of chocolate to eat. TIPPETT: It’s like the satisfaction of a craving? MR. McCULLOUGH: It is exactly like that. It is literally a craving. What you see is high activation in the brain’s reward system. . . . The desire for revenge does not come from some sick dark part of how our minds operate. It is a craving to solve a problem and accomplish a goal.
”
”
Celeste Headlee (We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter)
“
Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!”
“Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.”
“Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?”
“Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.”
(...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?”
“Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself.
“You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you.
”
”
John C. Wright (The Golden Age (Golden Age, #1))
“
Fully aware that life is too short for the choice to be anything but irreparable, he had been distressed to discover that he felt no spontaneous attraction to any occupation. Rather sceptically, he looked over the array of available possibilities: prosecutors, who spend their whole lives persecuting people; schoolteachers, the butt of rowdy children; science and technology, whose advances bring enormous harm along with a small benefit; the sophisticated, empty chatter of the social sciences; interior design (which appealed to him because of his memories of his cabinetmaker grandfather), utterly enslaved by fashions he detested; the occupation of the poor pharmacists now reduced to peddlars of boxes and bottles. When he wondered; what should I choose for my whole life's work? his inner self would fall into the most uncomfortable silence.
”
”
Milan Kundera (Identity)
“
There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.
”
”
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
“
It is a common practice of life to focus on the world immediately before us, the one we see and smell and touch every day. It grounds us where we are, with our communities and our known corners and concerns. But to see the full supply chains of Al requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place and yet are deeply interconnected by the multiple forces of extraction.
”
”
Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence)
“
Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability, the following covenant: I will respect all people for their integrity and wisdom, understanding that they are experts in their own lives, and will gladly share with them all the benefits of my knowledge. I will use my skills and resources to create bridges for human potential, not barriers. I will create tools that remove obstacles between resources and the people who need them. I will not use my technical knowledge to compound the disadvantage created by historic patterns of racism, classism, able-ism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, and other forms of oppression. I will design with history in mind. To ignore a four-century-long pattern of punishing the poor is to be complicit in the “unintended” but terribly predictable consequences that arise when equity and good intentions are assumed as initial conditions. I will integrate systems for the needs of people, not data. I will choose system integration as a mechanism to attain human needs, not to facilitate ubiquitous surveillance. I will not collect data for data’s sake, nor keep it just because I can. When informed consent and design convenience come into conflict, informed consent will always prevail. I will design no data-based system that overturns an established legal right of the poor. I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings.
”
”
Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
“
230Our Internet debates...tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite...is always bad.
”
”
Evgeny Morozov
“
There's an analogy to be made between our craving for story and our craving for food. A tendency to overeat served our ancestors well when food shortages were a predictable part of life. But now that we modern desk jockeys are awash in cheap grease and corn syrup, overeating is more likely to fatten us up and kill us young. Likewise, it could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent - and where we have, in romance novels and television shows such as Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies. I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsumimg in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a "mental diabetes epidemic." Similarly, as digital technology evolves, our stories - ubiquitous, immersive, interactive - may become dangerously attractive. The real threat isn't that story will fade out of human life in the future; its that story will take it over completely.
”
”
Jonathan Gottschall (The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human)
“
And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t get eternal life. That argument convinced a lot of people that it didn’t do any harm to believe in religion. But in fact it did them harm and it’s what killed them all because if they had believed in science instead of religion 2,000 years ago we would all be immortal now.
”
”
Max More (The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future)
“
We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when it does, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you: you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone.
”
”
John C. Wright (The Golden Age (Golden Age, #1))
“
Ultimately the danger of the New Jim Code positioning is that existing social biases are reinforced – yes. But new methods of social control are produced as well. Does this mean that every form of technological prediction or personalization has racist effects? Not necessarily. It means that, whenever we hear the promises of tech being extolled, our antennae should pop up to question what all that hype of “better, faster, fairer” might be hiding and making us ignore. And, when bias and inequity come to light, “lack of intention” to harm is not a viable alibi. One cannot reap the reward when things go right but downplay responsibility when they go wrong.
”
”
Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
“
Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the “dying role” and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life’s most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of people’s lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done. Peg
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
The economist Paul Romer distinguishes between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents on Christmas morning, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one.108 We cannot be complacently optimistic about climate change, but we can be conditionally optimistic. We have some practicable ways to prevent the harms and we have the means to learn more. Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
As much as the scientific community currently enthralled with mindfulness would like to set aside the ethical component of the Buddhist tradition to focus their studies on the technology of meditation, we can see from this Abhidhamma treatment of the subject that true mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. Although the brain science has yet to discover why, this tradition nonetheless declares, based entirely on its phenomenological investigations, that when the mind is engaged in an act of harming it is not capable of mindfulness. There can be heightened attention, concentration, and energy when a sniper takes a bead on his target, for example, but as long as the intention is situated in a context of taking life, it will always be under the sway of hatred, delusion, wrong view (ditthi, 19), or some other of the unwholesome factors. Just as a tree removed from the forest is no longer a tree but a piece of lumber, so also the caring attentiveness of mindfulness, extracted from its matrix of wholesome co-arising factors, degenerates into mere attention.
”
”
Andrew Olendzki (Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism)
“
They say that if you feel you don’t have fifteen minutes to meditate each day, then you need to do an hour. I’m sure it would do me no harm at all, but I’ve never been much of a man for sitting cross-legged, focusing on my breath. Instead, I prefer to whittle. Whittling is a form of practical meditation, which pre-dates the Buddhist and Hindu civilisations. It’s as simple as it gets. To make a tablespoon you take a branch – I prefer green birch, but holly, beech, maple and cherry can work well. Avoid softwoods. Saw it to length, axe it in half, draw out the shape of the spoon you’re aiming for, and start whittling it away with a small carving knife. Your knife, along with your sense of awareness, needs to be sharp. Drift away in your thoughts, worries or daydreams for one moment and, if you’re lucky, you’ll shave off a sliver of wood that may take you twenty minutes to correct; in the final stages you may not be able to correct it at all. If you’re unlucky, you may shave off a sliver of flesh from your finger that may take a week or two to correct itself. Nothing focuses the mind better than blood, or the thought of showing the woman you love an ugly, impractical spoon.
”
”
Mark Boyle (The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology)
“
THE TECHNOSPHERE DOESN’T particularly care whether you live or die, or whether you are happy or miserable. Its goal is to control you and to make you serve its purposes, which are to grow, to control everything and to dominate the biosphere. How it achieves this control is a matter of what is most efficient. If you are one of its faithful servants, then the best way to make you do your job well is to incentivize you—to give you high status, ample pay and lots of perks. But if you are a lowly menial grunt in its service who, unfortunately, cannot yet be replaced by a shiny new robot, then low pay and low status suffice, and destroying your autonomy and self-reliance while fostering your dependency is the key to making you perform. If you are a technologically useless person but harmless—an artist, a philosopher, writer, poet, free thinker—then the technosphere simply can’t see you, because what you do is not measurable in units the technosphere can understand. But if your thinking turns out to be dangerous or harmful to the techno-sphere—because you are someone who tries to break the chains of dependency and to find ways to live outside of the technosphere, or to undermine it in some other way—then it will consider you as nothing less than a terrorist!
”
”
Dmitry Orlov (Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom)
“
In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same rate of 1.5–2 percent per year throughout the period 1820–2012. To be sure, growth slowed a bit between 1930 and 1950 to just over 1.5 percent, then increased again to just over 2 percent between 1950 and 1970, and then slowed to less than 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. In Western Europe, which suffered much more from the two world wars, the variations are considerably greater: per capita output stagnated between 1913 and 1950 (with a growth rate of just over 0.5 percent) and then leapt ahead to more than 4 percent from 1950 to 1970, before falling sharply to just slightly above US levels (a little more than 2 percent) in the period 1970–1990 and to barely 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012.
Western Europe experienced a golden age of growth between 1950 and 1970, only to see its growth rate diminish to one-half or even one-third of its peak level during the decades that followed.
[...]
If we looked only at continental Europe, we would find an average per capita output growth rate of 5 percent between 1950 and 1970—a level well beyond that achieved in other advanced countries over the past two centuries.
These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown.
In Great Britain and the United States, postwar history is interpreted quite differently. Between 1950 and 1980, the gap between the English-speaking countries and the countries that had lost the war closed rapidly. By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels.
In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914–1945 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized [...] Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it.
”
”
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty First Century)
“
Letter to the tech giants:
When fame and abundance kiss somebody’s feet before that person is wise enough, he or she is very likely to lose track of what’s necessity and what’s luxury. And modern society is filled with examples of such intelligent stupidity – stupidity that is carried out by apparently smart humans. Because being smart is not the same as being wise. The world has enough smartness, but not enough wisdom to bring that smartness into proper productive practice – and I mean productive practice not sophisticated practice – there is a difference. A person smart enough to visualize a Falcon rocket engine can easily pinpoint the locations of various organizations that spread terrorism, yet the person chooses to explore the space further instead of prioritizing the technological advantages to first fix real issues of the human society that inflict harm to the humans every walk of the way.
The world is a miserable place not because we have lack of resources, but because those who have an abundance of resources do not have the slightest idea of true human need. The resources needed for colonizing Mars if put to proper practice can fix the world’s global warming issues – it can fix the world’s climate change issues – it can fix the world’s terrorism issues, yet people are more interested in the pompous idea of living in Mars for whatever reason, instead of paying attention to improving human condition on earth. I am not against technological advancement, for I am a scientist, but my soul aches when I see smart people are dumb enough to chase after illusory glory of doing something different and innovative instead of focusing the powers of their soul on cleaning up the misery business on earth. You can, yet you don’t. Why?
Smartness without wisdom is stupidity. You are smart – yes indeed – but I am sorry – you are stupid at the same time. How can you dream of having a cheese burger on Mars when your own kind on Earth is suffering! How can you think of taking rich kids into the orbit just so they can admire the beauty of earth from the heavens, when that very earth is infested with the primordial evils of human character! Awaken the human within you my friend, and pay attention. Awaken the human within and let it consume all the miseries from the world that you live in. Say a member of your family falls ill, would you ignore his or her misery completely just because you want to make life more comfortable for others than it already is, or would you first try everything in your capacity in order to heal your loved one!
Be wise my friend, for it is not enough to be smart. You are smart – there is no doubt about that – so utilize that smartness for humanity and heal your own kind. Heal your kind with your capacity my friend. It is wailing for healers – not some delusional faith healers, but real tangible healers. Would you not do anything! Would you not give your soul to fix the broken soul of this world! Arise my friend, Awake my friend and work for humanity, not to make it sophisticated, but to make it peaceful first. Remember, humanity first, then everything else. Peace first, sophistication later. Harmony first, luxury later.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar
“
Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system—and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found—if there's anyone out there to do the finding.
We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things?
Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.
Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
“
Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic surgery.” And, withour technological prowess, we succeed in creating fresh addictions. Some psychologists now describe a new clinical pathology — Internet sex addiction disorder. Physicians and psychologists may not be all that effective in treating addictions, but we’re expert at coming up with fresh names and categories. A recent study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 5.5 per cent of men and 6 per cent of women appear to be addicted shoppers.
The lead researcher, Dr. Lorrin Koran, suggested that compulsive buying be recognized as a unique illness listed under its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official psychiatric catalogue. Sufferers of this “new” disorder are afflicted by “an irresistible, intrusive and senseless impulse” to purchase objects they do not need. I don’t scoff at the harm done by shopping addiction — I’m in no position to do that — and I agree that Dr. Koran accurately describes the potential consequences of compulsive buying: “serious psychological, financial and family problems, including depression, overwhelming debt and the breakup of relationships.”
But it’s clearly not a distinct entity — only another manifestation of addiction tendencies that run through our culture, and of the fundamental addiction process that varies only in its targets, not its basic characteristics. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified another item of addiction. “Here we have a serious problem,” he said. “America is addicted to oil.” Coming from a man who throughout his financial and political career has had the closest possible ties to the oil industry.
The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered. Consider how much greater a price has been exacted by this socially sanctioned addiction than by the drug addiction for which Ralph and his peers have been declared outcasts. And oil is only one example among many: consider soul-, body-or Nature-destroying addictions to consumer goods, fast food, sugar cereals, television programs and glossy publications devoted to celebrity gossip—only a few examples of what American writer Kevin Baker calls “the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism.
”
”
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
In 2006, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way that would confirm a widespread misconception about certain ideas in American politics. As soon as a person read a fake article, experimenters then handed over a true article that corrected the first. For instance, one article suggested that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The next article corrected the first and said that the United States had never found them, which was the truth. Those opposed to the war or who had strong liberal leanings tended to disagree with the original article and accept the second. Those who supported the war and leaned more toward the conservative camp tended to agree with the first article and strongly disagree with the second. These reactions shouldn’t surprise you. What should give you pause, though, is how conservatives felt about the correction. After reading that there were no WMDs, they reported being even more certain than before that there actually were WMDs and that their original beliefs were correct.
The researchers repeated the experiment with other wedge issues, such as stem cell research and tax reform, and once again they found that corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired.
Researchers Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks expanded on this work in 2013. In their study, people already suspicious of electronic health records read factually incorrect articles about such technologies that supported those subjects’ beliefs. In those articles, the scientists had already identified any misinformation and placed it within brackets, highlighted it in red, and italicized the text. After they finished reading the articles, people who said beforehand that they opposed electronic health records reported no change in their opinions and felt even more strongly about the issue than before. The corrections had strengthened their biases instead of weakening them.
Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.
”
”
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
“
most of the students were aware of their place in time and society, sensitive to the fact that an exploding technology hadn’t obliterated the human ability to make mistakes. It was important for them to be acutely aware of situations that could cause harm or death to their patients and waste their hard-earned incomes on malpractice settlements.
”
”
Noah Gordon (Matters of Choice (The Cole Trilogy))
“
Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the “dying role” and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life’s most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of people’s lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
Smartphones are a great portal for knowledge, but when the people do not know how to use them, those very devices do more harm to the inner wellbeing of a person, young and old alike, than they do good.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar
“
this is not a story about consumer harm based on monopoly pricing, although that can be part of the problem. The graver problem is that the pace of innovation may be slowed, denying consumers the full benefits of technological progress that a dynamically competitive market would offer.” This phenomenon has been dubbed excess inertia, referring to the power of network effects to slow or prevent the adoption of new, perhaps better, technologies. When one or a few platforms can dominate a particular market because of the power of network effects, they may choose to resist beneficial innovations in order to protect themselves from the costs of change and other disruptive effects.
”
”
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
“
we would encourage regulators to have a light touch in order to encourage innovation. Change often provokes anxiety, and there’s an understandable impulse to slow the pace of technological and economic innovation in order to fend off unforeseeable consequences that may be harmful. But history suggests that, in most cases, allowing change to flourish leads mainly to positive results in the long run.
”
”
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
“
The comedian Jon Stewart, who was more than willing to jump on the Big-Food-is-bad bandwagon, remarked that pink slime should instead be called “ammonia-soaked centrifuge-separated by-product paste.”15 He was working off a popular narrative. He could have instead featured the harm to a family-owned business that was innovating to make food safer and more affordable by preventing food waste. But that’s not very funny.
”
”
Jayson Lusk (Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World)
“
I’m sympathetic to the idea of drug legalization as a response to this. We made a tragic mistake through the twentieth century in gradually criminalizing drugs that ought to have been dealt with—were being dealt with—medically. We created a profit center for mafias around the world. We stopped considering ways to reduce overdose deaths—studying, for example, how safe injection sites work elsewhere. Among other things, criminalization also prevented us from fully studying these drugs for their medicinal benefits and harms. The problem is, I don’t trust American capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly. The last fifty years are replete with examples of corporations turning addictive services and substances against us, fine-tuning their addictiveness, then marketing them aggressively. Remember when social media was going to be the great technological connective tissue, bringing people together, inaugurating a new era of understanding? Instead, it midwifed an era of virulent tribalism. The opioid epidemic began with legal drugs, irresponsibly marketed and prescribed. The Sacklers are only one example of a tendency that nestles into every corner of American capitalism when it is allowed to extract maximum profit from products and services that neuroscience shows our brains are vulnerable to. Meanwhile, alcohol and cigarettes kill more than any other drug by far, because they are legal and widely available. Alcohol also drives arrests and incarceration more than any other single drug. Our brains are no match for the consumer and marketing culture to emerge in the last few decades. They are certainly no match for the highly potent illegal street drugs now circulating.
”
”
Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
“
harm and oppression—can be used to deflect attention from abuses of power. Those who abuse power given to them by virtue of their position can use the technologies intended to challenge abuses of power to abuse power. A bully with a complaint procedure is a bully with another weapon. Power is also the ability to influence how we are received. When some people matter more, their feelings matter more (“his distress was worth so much more than mine”). We are back to the significance of immanence. You don’t need to complain about not being taken more seriously if you are taken more seriously. But if those who are taken more seriously complain, then their complaints are taken more seriously.
”
”
Sara Ahmed (Complaint!)
“
Science is Service (The Sonnet)
Extraordinary technology brings extraordinary recklessness,
Because the human mind hasn't matured like technology has.
We may have developed technology that defies human limits,
Evolutionary predispositions of the mind haven't disappeared.
That's why I say, bigger the power the smaller the mind.
For a wielder without backbone, silicon is but plaything.
Even an ounce of science can do unimaginable harm.
To fathom it you gotta step out of the glare most blinding.
Science 'n society go together, can't have one without the other.
Where there is love for science, there is love for society.
If this simple thing doesn't penetrate the skull of us thickies.
We would be better off without all the scientific glory.
Science is an act of service in the course of lifting all humanity.
Science without accountability is no different from a conspiracy theory.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None)
“
Stay Behind (The Sonnet)
While mine owners' kids are packing,
Their mittens to colonize Mars,
How about you stay behind,
To give light as an earthly human star!
I am not here to teach you how to code,
I am here to show you why code.
I am not here to teach you science,
But to humanize the scientific road.
Okay if they don't know the role of science,
You for one, don't walk in their dirtsteps.
You are wise, brave, and above all, human,
Be the practitioner of humanitarian science.
Science is superpower, always use it wisely.
Little science does much harm if used recklessly.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None)
“
The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a silver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions-nursing homes and intensive care units-where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Atul Gawande)
“
Those who want to do harm, they'll do harm whether they have nukes at their disposal or bow and arrow.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather)
“
It's not technology that does the harm, it's the person wielding it.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather)
“
These scholars, whose influence far outweighs their numbers, generally trained or work in elite Western academia and operate according to a densely theoretical framework that originated in France and proliferated in the United States and the United Kingdom. Their work is of very little practical relevance to people living in previously colonized countries, who are trying to deal with the political and economic aftermath. There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.51
”
”
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
“
In cases like these, most economists advocate taxing the pollution. Such taxes are called “Pigovian” after Arthur Pigou, a British economist of the early twentieth century who was one of their early champions. The taxes have two important benefits. First, they reduce the amount of undesirable activity; if a utility gets taxed based on the amount of sulfur dioxide it releases into the atmosphere, it has strong incentives to invest in scrubber technology that leaves the air cleaner. Second, Pigovian taxes raise revenue for the government, which could be used to compensate those harmed by the pollution (or for any other purpose). They’re a win-win. Taxes of this type are popular across the political spectrum and among people in many fields; members of the “Pigou Club,” a group of advocates identified by economist Gregory Mankiw, include both Alan Greenspan and Ralph Nader.
”
”
Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
“
We have all embraced technology. It makes our lives easier and more comfortable. Unfortunately, it has harmed nature in may different ways. It has worked against nature and the environment that we live in.
Imagine if technology was built and used in a way that both simulated and augmented nature so as not to impair it.
Imagine if we could use the colors of the rainbow to grow plant life.
Harvest the wind as a natural energy source without the use of wind turbines as they now are.
Re-growing arid areas with a flowable water system that reforested the world.
We had a company that put money into development and life instead of putting money into shareholder's pockets.
It may come true...one day.
”
”
Anthony T. Hincks
“
One of the first things that became clear during this exploration is that our culture’s relationship with these tools is complicated by the fact that they mix harm with benefits. Smartphones, ubiquitous wireless internet, digital platforms that connect billions of people—these are triumphant innovations! Few serious commentators think we’d be better off retreating to an earlier technological age. But at the same time, people are tired of feeling like they’ve become a slave to their devices. This reality creates a jumbled emotional landscape where you can simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos on Instagram while fretting about this app’s ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking with friends or reading.
”
”
Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
“
Unless we understand our natural intelligence, we will not be able to manage Artificial Intelligence. We will only use it to feed our already bloated ego."
As we venture into the era of Artificial Intelligence, it is essential to reflect on the profound wisdom in this statement. Understanding our own natural intelligence - our cognitive abilities, emotions, and ethical considerations - is the key to responsibly harnessing the potential of AI.
Let's embark on a journey of self-awareness and humility. By recognizing our strengths and limitations as humans, we can identify the areas where AI can complement and enhance our capabilities, rather than overshadowing or replacing them.
With a clear understanding of our own biases and motivations, we can ensure that AI is developed and utilized in ways that benefit all of humanity. Let's not allow AI to reinforce harmful behaviors or serve as a tool to feed our egos, rather let's channel its power for the greater good.
By embracing our humanity and acting responsibly, we can manage AI in a manner that promotes ethics, privacy, and societal well-being. Let's use AI as a force for positive advancements, lifting each other and creating a more inclusive and equitable world.
#EmbraceHumanity #TechnologyForGood
”
”
Chidi Ejeagba
“
If technologies don’t make us better, then the damage and harm is irreparable.
”
”
Kingsley ofosu-Ampong
“
The CEO had long been interested in pandemics. He and his wife, Priscilla, had launched the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in 2016, with a mission to “support the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century.” Zuckerberg was particularly interested in immunization, as it involved technology and, above all, scale. To run the Biohub, Zuckerberg hired Joseph DeRisi, a biochemist at the University of California San Francisco, who had invented the technology that first identified severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which happened to be a coronavirus. Just months before the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg had livestreamed a discussion with DeRisi that touched on advances in virology and addressed “the erosion of a sense of truth and trust in experts.
”
”
Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
“
I’d recommend HEPA filter models and avoiding air cleaning technologies that may emit harmful by-products,6808 such as electrostatic precipitators (ionizers)6809 and negative ion generators.
”
”
Michael Greger (How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older)
“
Finally, it’s not clear that government and the tech industry are competing for exactly the same people. The biggest bidding wars among the tech giants and startups is for technologists who work with advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. Outside of national security and defense (where such skills are very much in demand), government is rarely competing for this talent pool. The skills most needed in government are good product management and service design. The work is hard not because the tech is complicated but because the environment is. Arrogance can be an asset in startups; in government, humility is not only necessary but soon acquired if one doesn’t start out with it. While emotional intelligence matters in all jobs more than the Silicon Valley caricature allows for, it is critical in public-sector work, which is more about change and human responses to change than about technology. The same goes for ethics: a sense of responsibility to the common good and a willingness to think deeply about what harm might come from your actions are assets in any field, but if you’re not already considering these factors, working in government will bring them front and center. When entrepreneurs say that government will never do tech well because lower pay means it won’t get the best people, it’s worth asking what they mean by “best.
”
”
Jennifer Pahlka (Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better)
“
Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic.
His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo?
He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude.
A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not.
The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety.
The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world.
The word is 'thanks'.
'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?'
'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.'
"Any chance you can recover any of it?'
'You sitting near a window, Gerry?'
'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?'
'Can you see the sky?'
'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.'
'See any pigs flying past?'
To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears.
'...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.'
'..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.'
He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day.
..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year.
'...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator.
'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.'
On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...'
Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis.
'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.'
It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time.
'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.'
'Ever heard of knocking on a door?'
'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?'
'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.'
No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.
”
”
Peter James
“
Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic.
His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo?
He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude.
A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not.
The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety.
The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world.
The word is 'thanks'.
'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?'
'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.'
"Any chance you can recover any of it?'
'You sitting near a window, Gerry?'
'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?'
'Can you see the sky?'
'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.'
'See any pigs flying past?'
To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears.
'...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.'
'..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.'
He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day.
..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year.
'...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator.
'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.'
On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...'
Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis.
'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.'
It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time.
'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.'
'Ever heard of knocking on a door?'
'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?'
'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.'
No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.
”
”
Peter James (Dead at First Sight (Roy Grace, #15))
“
Regardless of its ultimate origin, the natural morality differs from the conventional morality in that it does not consist of explicit statements which dictate behaviour in specific contexts. Instead, the natural morality is really just a set of six principles which provide a foundation for the subject to judge given situations individually. The first principle, for example, forbids harming anyone who has not harmed or threatened to harm you. The second principle justifies self-defence.[220] The third principle encourages returning favours to those who have helped you before.[221] The fourth principle encourages the strong to have consideration for the weak. The fifth principle discourages lying. Finally, the sixth principle encourages one to keep one’s word and honour agreements to which one had committed oneself.
”
”
Chad A. Haag (The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology)
“
I believe in the power of business to positively shape the world. It was the business opportunity offered by the legalization of cannabis that provided the practical incentives to destigmatize its use and reverse decades of injustice and harmful propaganda. Whether it is cannabis legalization or emerging products, technologies or industries, we must embrace disruption. Change is good, change is opportunity. Change is evolution.
”
”
Adam Bierman (Weed Empire: How I Battled Gangsters, Investment Banks, and the Department of Justice to Build the Cannabis Industry in America)
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Pharmaceutical companies became very interested in using siRNAs as potential new drugs. Theoretically, siRNA molecules could be used to knock down expression of any protein that was believed to be harmful in a disease. In the same year that Fire and Mello were awarded their Nobel Prize, the giant pharmaceutical company Merck paid over one billion US dollars for a siRNA company in California called Sirna Therapeutics. Other large pharmaceutical companies have also invested heavily. But in 2010 a bit of a chill breeze began to drift through the pharmaceutical industry. Roche, the giant Swiss company, announced that it was stopping its siRNA programmes, despite having spent more than $500 million on them over three years. Its neighbouring Swiss corporation, Novartis, pulled out of a collaboration with a siRNA company called Alnylam in Massachusetts. There are still plenty of other companies who have stayed in this particular game, but it would probably be fair to say there’s a bit more nervousness around this technology than in the past. One of the major problems with using this kind of approach therapeutically may sound rather mundane. Nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, are just difficult to turn into good drugs. Most good existing drugs – ibuprofen, Viagra, anti-histamines – have certain characteristics in common. You can swallow them, they get across your gut wall, they get distributed around your body, they don’t get destroyed too quickly by your liver, they get taken up by cells, and they work their effects on the molecules in or on the cells. Those all sound like really simple things, but they’re often the most difficult things to get right when developing a new drug. Companies will spend tens of millions of dollars – at least – getting this bit right, and it is still a surprisingly hit-and-miss process. It’s so much worse when trying to create drugs around nucleic acids. This is partly because of their size. An average siRNA molecule is over 50 times larger than a drug like ibuprofen. When creating drugs (especially ones to be taken orally rather than injected) the general rule is, the smaller the better. The larger a drug is, the greater the problems with getting high enough doses into patients, and keeping them in the body for long enough. This may be why a company like Roche has decided it can spend its money more effectively elsewhere. This doesn’t mean that siRNA won’t ever work in the treatment of illnesses, it’s just quite high risk as a business venture.
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Nessa Carey (The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance)
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We do not find much evidence supporting the counter-argument that higher taxes on this population will harm economic growth by eroding high earners’ initiative.
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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people working collaboratively with technology are far more effective than either people or technology alone.
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Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
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If you do a single thing—and especially if there is a lot of money in that single thing—you should put a ‘Welcome, Robots!’ doormat outside your office,” wrote technology expert Farhad Manjoo in Slate. “They’re coming for you.
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Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
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The fantastic technologies we have invented over the centuries, the ones of ancient tales and science fiction, enable us to do things that human beings earnestly want to do but cannot do without a little (or a lot) of help from technology. They make it possible to fly, communicate without words, be invisible, live forever, withstand powerful forces, protect ourselves from any harm, see farther and travel faster than the greatest athletes. They are tools that make us incredible, supercapable versions of ourselves. These
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David Rose (Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things)
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there is no guarantee that the time freed up by our newfound technological efficiencies will be made available for the human touch. A look at the modern history of industrial computerization would have one lay odds that this squishy stuff will be precisely what is sacrificed on the altar of productivity, particularly once every word, touch, and minute is measured, analyzed, and priced out.
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Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
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There is almost no area of human life today that is not touched by the effects of science and technology. Yet are we clear about the place of science in the totality of human life—what exactly it should do and by what it should be governed? This last point is critical because unless the direction of science is guided by a consciously ethical motivation, especially compassion, its effects may fail to bring benefit. They may indeed cause great harm.
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Dalai Lama XIV (The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality)
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The writing is on the wall. Technology is leaving us increasingly connected, dependent, and vulnerable. Though the myriad scientific breakthroughs enabled by exponential technology promise great and untold benefits for humanity, they must be guided and protected from those who would exploit them to harm others. We ignore the overwhelming evidence of technological risk around us at our own peril.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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This expansion of choices (including the choice to do harm) is an increase in freedom—and this increase in freedoms and choices and opportunities is the foundation of our progress, of our humanity, and of our individual happiness. Our
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Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
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The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.
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Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology)
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Legal You will learn that there are restrictions placed upon you in some areas. These restrictions are for your own protection. You will be prohibited from administering medications, recording sponge counts, or carrying out direct physician’s orders regarding treatment of a patient out of your scope of practice. As soon as you overstep your limitations and boundaries and perform any of these actions, you are placing yourself in legal jeopardy. Whether functioning under the supervision of a surgeon or a registered nurse, a CST is always part of the surgical team and you must carry out your responsibilities within the scope of your practice. Never try to do a task that does not fall within that realm. All counts are significant and have important legal ramifications. When performing a count, it is crucial to ensure that the count is correct for the patient’s well-being. When you are scrubbed, you count sponges while the registered nurse observes and records the count. At any given time during a surgical procedure, the CST may request a sponge, and possibly a sharps count to take place. If you are assisting the circulating nurse in a nonsterile role, you may assist with the counts as long as the nurse verifies it. In this scenario, the nurse is legally acting as the surgeon’s agent. It is the responsibility of the registered nurse to obtain the required medications for a case. The CST draws the drugs into syringes and mixes drugs when scrubbed; during this process, the proper sequence of medication verification and labeling must occur. In any phase of your responsibilities, there are possible grounds for legal breaches. Shortcuts may cause a patient to suffer tragic complications, even loss of life. Negligence must be avoided. Both as an employed CST and as a student, you carry the responsibility to do no harm. If you should become discouraged in your role or begin to feel this responsibility is overwhelming, it could simply mean that you need a change; it isn’t always the other team players or the place of employment that are at
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Karen L Chambers (Surgical Technology Review Certification & Professionalism)
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In principle, an open society sees information flow as a good thing, to be hampered only in the presence of strong evidence that harm cannot be prevented by any other means.
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David Brin (The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us To Choose Between Privacy And Freedom?)
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According to accepted standards of internet marketing, an online presence is essential to the success of today's business. Unfortunately, the success of the Internet has also given the opportunity for unqualified and unprofessional Minneapolis web designers to market their services making it very difficult for clients to determine to best web designer for them. If your web site is made by a dreadful web designer, it can have a harmful effect on your business and cost you dearly! there has been a major increase in the use of Internet-related knowledge. An increase in the request of information technology in diverse fields has opened wider career opportunities. Operating a small business without a website is like trying to push an incredibly heavy rock up an impossibly steep hill. But a web presence means that your branding needs to be look at first. One part of that is finding the right branding agency Minneapolis not only has the best talent, but also professionals who understand that the heart is the target for any visual branding effort. Minneapolis web design aims at deliver the best customer solution in any . All these are obtainable with the intention of as long as you with an outstanding service so that we know about your services and the way you function.
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sophiya
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there is broad scientific consensus that the technology is at least as safe as all techniques we have been using. . . . There is not a single documented case of harm from the technology—I doubt that there is any technology ever with such an unprecedented safety track record.” Most
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Jayson Lusk (Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World)
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If space is cold and dead, technology can make it warm and alive. If the universe doesn’t care, we can do so ourselves through an essentially altruistic system of ethics. If flesh-sentients are intrinsically less capable of developing this system of ethics than machine intelligence, then the distant descendants of the first self-aware AIs to which we gave birth will take over the running of our society and leave us free to enjoy ourselves without doing harm to others. If the only godlike beings are self-upgraded sentients originally born out of the same muck as everyone else, the implication is that it is indeed possible for us to be better than we once were. And
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Simone Caroti (The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction)
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All the technology in the world is not going to help you if it’s not intuitive and if the end user can’t use it.
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Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
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I should note that some studies have failed to find evidence of harm. One well-known study reported that the association of digital media use with harmful psychological outcomes was so close to zero that it was roughly the same size as the association of “eating potatoes” with such harms.[5] But when Jean Twenge and I reanalyzed the same data sets and zoomed in on the association of social media (as opposed to a broader measure of digital technology use that included watching TV and owning a computer) with poor mental health for girls (instead of all teens merged together), we found much larger correlations.[6] The proper comparison was no longer eating potatoes but instead binge drinking or using marijuana. There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link[7] between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls,[8] but that relationship gets buried or minimized in studies and literature reviews that look at all digital activities
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Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness)
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consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.
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Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
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How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?
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Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
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The progress of known biologically harmful technologies is on course to damage this generation and to destroy future generations.
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Steven Magee
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BlockBlueLight is Australia's premium supplier of blue and artificial light blocking products. After learning about how artificial light past sundown has such a drastic impact on our sleep and health we crated the products to the damage while still living with technology. BlockBlueLight deliver the most optimal science backed blue light glasses and blue blocking lighting solutions, aiming to alleviate digital eye strain, improve sleep, and optimise health through mitigating the harmful effects of artificial light.
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Block Blue Light
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A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.
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Ralph Nader (Unsafe at Any Speed)
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Postmodern thinkers reacted to modernism by denying the foundations of some aspects of Modern thought, while claiming that other aspects of Modern thinking didn't go far enough. In particular, they rejected the underlying modernist desire for authenticity, unifying narratives, universalism, and progress, achieved primarily through scientific knowledge and technology. At the same time, they took the modernists' relatively measured, if pessimistic, skepticism of tradition, religion, and Enlightenment-era certainty - along with their reliance on self-consciousness, nihilism, and ironic forms of critique - to extremes. Postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.
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Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
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Half the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves. —T. S. Eliot
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David Zahl (Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It)
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Thus this matter of choosing the “best” stocks is at bottom a highly controversial one. Our advice to the defensive investor is that he let it alone. Let him emphasize diversification more than individual selection. Incidentally, the universally accepted idea of diversification is, in part at least, the negation of the ambitious pretensions of selectivity. If one could select the best stocks unerringly, one would only lose by diversifying. Yet within the limits of the four most general rules of common-stock selection suggested for the defensive investor (on pp. 114–115) there is room for a rather considerable freedom of preference. At the worst the indulgence of such preferences should do no harm; beyond that, it may add something worthwhile to the results. With the increasing impact of technological developments on long-term corporate results, the investor cannot leave them out of his calculations. Here, as elsewhere, he must seek a mean between neglect and overemphasis.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The Honorable Harvest…does not say don’t take, but offers inspiration and a model for what we should take. It’s not so much a list of “do not’s” as a list of “do’s.” Do eat food that is honorably harvested, and celebrate every mouthful. Do use technologies that minimize harm; do take what is given. This philosophy guides not only our taking of food, but also any taking of the gifts of Mother Earth–air, water, and the literal body of the earth: the rocks and soil and fossil fuels.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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The company’s new approach was best summed up in a series of presentations accompanying yet another shake-up announced in mid-2022. All of the company’s Integrity and societally focused teams would report into a new structure with a mission to “amplify the good that happens on Meta’s technology platforms.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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The company’s new approach was best summed up in a series of presentations accompanying yet another shake-up announced in mid-2022. All of the company’s Integrity and societally focused teams would report into a new structure with a mission to “amplify the good that happens on Meta’s technology platforms.” That structure would, in turn, support efforts on the Facebook and Instagram apps to “increase awareness of Meta’s positive impact on the world” and ultimately “win hearts and shift perceptions.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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This should be a medical and not be a military operation,” Holocaust survivor and medical ethics advocate Vera Sharav told me. “It’s a public health problem. Why are the military and the CIA so heavily involved? Why is everything a secret? Why can’t we know the ingredients of these products, which the taxpayers financed? Why are all their emails redacted? Why can’t we see the contracts with vaccine manufacturers? Why are we mandating a treatment with an experimental technology with minimal testing? Since COVID-19 harms fewer than 1 percent, what is the justification for putting 100 percent of the population at risk? We need to recognize that this is a vast human experiment on all of mankind, with an unproven technology, conducted by spies and generals primarily trained to kill and not to save lives.” What could possibly go wrong?
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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It was only with the beginning of a settled way of life that you got towns, settlements, monocultures, and technology—all the things that are harmful to the prospects for humanity.
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Werner Herzog (Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir)
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P3 - ten minutes of that movie, or indeed of any movie whose message is similarly dystopian about a post-aging world (Blade Runner), you will see that they set it up by insinuating, with exactly no justification and also no attempt at discussion (which is how they get away with not justifying it), that the defeat of aging will self-evidently bring about some new problem that we will be unable to solve without doing more harm than good. The most common such problem, of course, is overpopulation - and I refer you to literally about 1000 interviews and hundreds of talks I have given on stage and camera over the past 20 years, of which several dozen are online, for why such a concern is misplaced. The reason there are 1000, of course, is that most people WANT to believe that aging is a blessing in disguise - they find it expedient to put aging out of their minds and get on with their miserably short lives, however irrational must be the rationalizations by which they achieve that.
Aubrey has been asked on numerous occasions whether humans should use future tech to extend their lifespans. Aubrey opines, "I believe that humans should (and will) use (and, as a prerequisite, develop) future technologies to extend their healthspan, i.e. their healthy lifespan. But before fearing that I have lost my mind, let me stress that that is no more nor less than I have always believed. The reason people call me an “immortalist” and such like is only that I recognize, and am not scared to say, two other things: one, that extended lifespan is a totally certain side-effect of extended healthspan, and two, that the desire (and the legitimacy of the desire) to further extend healthspan will not suddenly cease once we achieve such-and-such a number of years."
On what people can do to advance longevity research, my answer to this question has radically changed in the past year. For the previous 20 years, my answer would have been “make a lot of money and give it to the best research”, as it was indisputable that the most important research could go at least 2 or 3x times faster if not funding-limited. But in the past year, with the influx of at least a few $B, much of it non-profit (and much of it coming from tech types who did exactly the above), the calculus has changed: the rate-limiter now is personnel. It’s more or less the case now that money is no longer the main rate-limiter, talent is: we desperately need more young scientists to see longevity as the best career choice.
As for how much current cryopreservation technology will advance in the next 10-20 years, and whether it enough for future reanimation? No question about the timeframe for a given amount of progress in any pioneering tech can be answered other than probabilistically. Or, to put it more simply, I don’t know - but I think there's a very good chance that within five years we will have cryo technology that inflicts only very little damage on biological tissue, such that yes, other advances in rejuvenation medicine that will repair the damage that caused the cryonaut to be pronounced dead in the first place will not be overwhelmed by cryopreservation damage, hence reanimation will indeed be possible.
As of now, the people who have been cryopreserved(frozen) the best (i.e. w/ vitrification, starting very shortly immediately after cardiac arrest) may, just possibly, be capable of revival by rewarming and repair of damage - but only just possibly.
Thus, the priority needs to be to improve the quality of cryopreservation - in terms of the reliability of getting people the best preservation that is technologically possible, which means all manner of things like getting hospitals more comfortable with cryonics practice and getting people to wear alarms that will alert people if they undergo cardiac arrest when alone, but even more importantly in terms of the tech itself, to reduce (greatly) the damage that is done to cells and tissues by the cryopreservation process.
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Aubrey de Grey
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Sending condemning emails, or taking hurtful actions and then hiding behind technology, is either a Supremacy action or Traumatized action. It insists on unilateral reality, the removal of difference. It deifies the inability to negotiate and enshrines the imagined victimized status as a desired position to reinforce and maintain.
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Sarah Schulman (Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair)
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Fulfilling one’s legal responsibility does not release a company from their ethical responsibility either. After we click a box to accept their terms and conditions, for example, many companies believe that they are free of responsibility for what happens next. Legally that may be true, but ethically speaking, they are not. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and any number of mobile gaming companies, for example, cannot deny their role in making what is increasingly accepted as addictive technology, simply because there is not yet a law against it. Particularly when they knowingly add features such as infinite scroll, “like” buttons, and automatic content play with the intent of keeping us peeled for longer. These companies almost always explain that they add such features or need to collect our personal data in order to “enhance the user experience.” Though we may indeed receive some benefit from these decisions, there is also a cost. Weighing those benefits against the harm they may cause or whether they violate our values is what ethics is all about! Nothing is for free.
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Simon Sinek (The Infinite Game)
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You are a species of slim means. You produce nothing beyond extra bodies to perform labour, and you have contributed nothing to the technological progress of the GC at large. You value being self-reliant, and you were, once, but now you eat our food and harvest our suns. If we kicked you out now, it would be difficult for you to sustain yourselves as you did before. And even with our help, the age of these vessels means you are constantly, irresponsibly courting a disaster like the one you’ve already weathered. These are the facts. Now, let us discuss the facts of my own species. We are the wealthiest species alive today. We want for nothing. Without us, there would be no tunnels, no ambi, no galactic map. But we achieved these things through subjugation. Violence. We destroyed entire worlds – entire species. It took a galactic war to stop us. We learned. We apologised. We changed. But we can’t give back the things we took. We’re still benefiting from them, and others are still suffering from actions centuries old. So, are we worthy? We, who give so much only because we took so much? Are you worthy, you who take without giving but have done no harm to your neighbours? Are the Aeluons worthy? Are the Quelin? Show me the species that has never wronged another. Show me who has always been perfect and fair.’ She flexed her body, her alien limbs curling strong. ‘Either we are all worthy of the Commons, dear Tamsin, or none of us are.
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Becky Chambers
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Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man—the space flights; the rockets and missiles; the “labyrinthine basement under the Snack Bar”; the pretty electronic plants, clean, hygienic and with flower beds; the poison gas which is not really harmful to people; the secrecy in which we all participate. This is the setting in which the great human achievements of science, medicine, technology take place; the efforts to save and ameliorate life are the sole promise in the disaster
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Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society)