Paterson is a 2016 comedy-drama film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. The film stars Adam Driver as a bus driver and poet named Paterson, and Golshifteh Farahani as his wife. The poet Ron Padgett provided the poems attributed to the character Paterson, while Jarmusch wrote the poem “Water Falls” attributed to a young girl in the film. (wiki)
A quiet observation of the triumphs and defeats of daily life, along with the poetry evident in its smallest details. (imdb)
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.
In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.
Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
timespace coordinates:Æon Flux (imdb) is set in a surrealGerman Expressionist style futuristic universe of the year 7698 AD. Æon Flux is comprised of a bizarre post-apocalypticdystopianworld of a barren wasteland, mutant creatures, clones, and robots within the last two border wall cities of Monica and Bregna (similar to the Berlin wall) somewhere in former Eastern Europe after an environmental catastrophe occured that wiped out 99 percent of the global population. The title character is a tall, sexy, dominatrix scantily-clad secret agent from the city of Monica, skilled in espionage, assassination and acrobatics. Her mission is to infiltrate the strongholds of the city of Bregna, which is led by her sworn enemy, and sometimes lover, Trevor Goodchild, the technocraticdictator of Bregna. The two sister cities engage in a futile never ending war for ideological supremacy; while Monica represents a dynamic nihilisticanarchist society where rules don’t exist, Bregna embodies a centralized scientific planned Orwellianpolice state. The names of their respective characters reflect this: Flux as the self-directedagent from Monica and Goodchild as the self-appointedleader of Bregna.
The term Æon comes from the Gnostic notion of Æons as emanations of the God, who come in male/female pairs (here Flux and Goodchild).
Æon Flux/ˌiːɒnˈflʌks/ is an American avant-garde science fiction animated television series that aired on MTV from November 30, 1991 until October 10, 1995, with film, comic book, and video game adaptations following thereafter. It premiered on MTV’s Liquid Television experimental animation show, as a six-part serial of short films, followed in 1992 by five individual short episodes. In 1995, a season of ten half-hour episodes aired as a stand-alone series. Æon Flux was created by American animator Peter Chung. Each Episode plots have elements of social science fiction, biopunk, allegory, dystopian fiction, spy fiction, psychological drama, postmodern visual, psychedelic imagery and Gnostic symbolism.
timespace coordinates: In 2011, a deadly pathogenic virus has killed 99% of the Earth’s population, forcing the survivors to regroup and scatter across the Earth. 404 years later, in late 2415, all of the survivors inhabit Bregna, a dystopian walled futuristic city-state, which is ruled by a congress of scientists.
The live-action movie Æon Flux(imdb), loosely based upon the series and starring Charlize Theron, was released in theaters on December 2, 2005, preceded in November of that year by a tie-in video game of the same name(Gameplay) based mostly on the movie but containing some elements of the original TV series. (wiki)
The Animatrix (Japanese: アニマトリックス, Hepburn: Animatorikkusu) is a 2003 animated science fiction anthology film produced by the Wachowskis. It is a compilation of nine animated short films based on The Matrix trilogy.
The film details the backstory of The Matrix series, including the original war between humankind and machines which led to the creation of the titular Matrix. (wiki)
Amundsen is a Norwegian film, released on 15 February 2019, that details the life of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen(1872 – 1928). It was directed by Espen Sandberg and was distributed in Norway by SF Studios. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 