BY DENNIS FITZGERALD
HOW can Iran claim the death of 176 people was “unintentional”?
Someone made a deliberate decision to fire a weapon to take down the plane. This type of technology must surely take several steps to activate – it couldn’t be so easy to use that a person could trip and truly “accidently” cause hundreds of deaths.
There is also the underlying reality that there was a weapon there that could cause all these deaths. That was no accident, that was intentional.
The path to peace requires many steps, including intentional planning and not pathetic lies dressed up as excuses for the inexcusable.
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From the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 technology show in Las Vegas comes another one of those surely-you-are-joking devices that show how much Science can be misused.
It’s an AI capable intelligent kitty litter box that can monitor and report your cat’s behavior and “output” from LuLuPet or should that be LooLooPet?
It looks for concerns with the cat’s body in places where cat owners cannot, or doesn’t want to. Which lucky scientists got to spend their years of training developing this and the technology to evaluate the cat’s outputs?
From the economics point, while researching this, a Google check showed you can spend over $1000 for a litter box but it is automatic. Surely with so many people who can’t afford food, there are better ways of spending your money.
Let’s encourage the scientists to work on curing diseases and improving food crops and respect the cat’s privacy.
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The International Olympic Committee has taken a stand on political or social statements at the 2020 Japan Olympics – you can’t, at least visibly. There is to be no kneeling, raising your fist or standing aside or basically anything that can be seen by a camera, but you can still tweet your feelings. But why?
The purpose of the Olympics is basically for the best to compete in a positive way, but not in a positive, drug test way. It is meant to show the best we can be although surely this should include the right to draw attention to the problems that exist around the world and that will still be there long after any one athlete kneels down.
The Olympics should be an opportunity for people to see what the world is like especially in countries where freedom of speech is not a right or apparent. The most famous Olympic protest was that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos supported by Peter Norman at the 1968 games which drew further attention to an issue that needed to be seen.
The need for visually clean games is also a result of the concerns about political correctness and the worry about offending some country that should be called out for their crimes and human rights violations.
People have a right to speak their mind unless they win a medal? This doesn’t seem like a good path to a better world.
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Again, there is another weird and wacky technology toy at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show, an invisible keyboard. Actually, it is really a non-existent keyboard.
Samsung has finally found a positive use for the selfie camera; it detects what your fingers are doing while typing on a table and converts that to keystrokes. Presumably you train it to recognize where your fingers are and what key they would be typing.
It would be fine for a trained typist and it should be to able to keep up with the average two finger typists but how are they going to know where all the keys are when they often take ages to find them on a physical keyboard?
Perhaps Samsung could also add a projector to display a keyboard on the table. It looks like they are solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
I’m not sure what it will type for the one finger gesture I am thinking of.
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Facebook has banned “Deepfakes”, an odd term surely.
It seems they won’t allow completely false, altered political videos although their management of news is not so specific. There seems to be a need to clarify the issue.
Basically, there should be now fake material on Facebook although even they recognize that would be impossible to really do given the number of posts and the need to check their accuracy.
As the US election – probably re-election of President Trump – gets closer the amount of political ads will increase. There are few that would doubt that many of the political promises are probably an exaggeration, almost a bribe and certainly not considered 100 percent reliable.
Even the simple things, like the “flat earthers” and the “moon landing deniers” are hard to stop much less the more dangerous ones such as the ant-vaccination groups or the climate change deniers so what hope is there for actual truth.
There is the phrase, “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” and if we even consider family Facebook pages of “brilliant” children, “wonderful” pets or even “fantastic” sporting achievements we can see that it will never be possible.
Good luck Facebook, you will need it and that is the truth. (dfitzger@melbpc.org.au/PN)
