The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Only deduction is certain. Whenever an inductive short-cut is applied, you can search for cases in which it will fail. It is always useful to ask “What relevant factors are not considered?” and “What irrelevant factors affect the conclusions?” By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
Among the redeeming qualities of our species is that we play. Indeed, we surround ourselves with toys, and we remain preoccupied with them throughout life… We display almost inconceivable creativity as we tinker with our playthings. The force of imagination and the passion for experimenting propel us toward outrageous designs and technological achievements.
The tabloid’s publisher, Robert Harrison, told Tom Wolfe in the late sixties: “You couldn’t put out a magazine like Confidential again. You know why? Because all the movie stars have started writing books about themselves! … They tell all! No magazine can compete with that.”… The intrusions into the private life of celebrities were replaced wholesale by their confessions. This shift from intrusion to confession is one of the signal events in the transformation of privacy in the late twentieth century.
This shift towards self-disclosure presents the mirror side of the “death of privacy” debate: pronounced anxieties about the emerging culture of confession. From the beginning of the debate over privacy, fears of intrusion were met by an equally potent distrust of the shifting boundaries of self-disclosure.
, Deborah Nelson, p. 18.
