technocrit

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/fuckcars@lemmy.world/t/2201156

In case you were worried about the roads being too safe, you can rest easily knowing that Teslas will be rolling out with unsupervised "Full Self Driving" in a couple days.

It doesn't seem to be going great, even in supervised mode. This one couldn't safely drive down a simple, perfectly straight road in broad daylight :( Veered off the road for no good reason. Glad nobody got badly hurt.

We analyze the onboard camera footage, and try to figure out what went wrong. Turns out, a lot. We also talk through how camera-only autonomous cars work, Tesla's upcoming autonomous taxi rollout, and how AI hallucinations figure into everything.

Across Africa, debates about cultural preservation and traditional values are increasingly being influenced by forces that promote conservative social agendas rooted in colonial and missionary legacies. These movements, often backed by generous Western funding, seek to impose rigid, exclusionary values that contradict the continent’s diverse and historically dynamic cultures.

A recent example of this dynamic played out last week in Nairobi, where the second Pan-African Conference on Family Values organised by the Africa Christian Professionals Forum sparked controversy by claiming to defend “traditional” African family values.

The event’s foreign supporters, including the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) and Family Watch International, are known for their opposition to LGBTQ rights, reproductive health, and comprehensive sex education.

These organisations, some classified as hate groups by the United States-based Southern Poverty Law Center, often present their positions as inherently African, despite their deep connections to Western conservative funding.

This duplicity came to the fore ahead of the conference in Nairobi when it was revealed that the preliminary list of speakers consisted entirely of white men.

During the event, participants were urged to “resist growing trends that seek to redefine marriage, weaken the institution of family, or devalue human sexuality” and to rise up to defend the African family from a “new colonialism”.

Yet the fact is that the narrative of preserving tradition that was on full display at the conference is far from organic. Instead, it itself continues a pattern established during the colonial era, when imperial powers imposed patriarchal norms and strict social hierarchies under the guise of paradoxically both preserving and “civilising” indigenous cultures.

In doing so, missionary and colonial institutions both reimagined and reframed African social structures to align with Victorian ideals, embedding rigid gender roles and heteronormative family models into the social fabric and inventing supposedly ancient and unchanging “traditions” to support them.

The latter were themselves built on self-serving ideas of Africans as “noble savages”, living in happy conformity with supposedly “natural” values, trapped by petrified “culture”, and undisturbed by the moral questions that plagued their civilised Western counterparts from whose corruption they needed to be protected...

Benjamin Donnie Ritchie was executed in the early morning hours Tuesday by the state of Indiana. The state barred representatives of the media from witnessing the gruesome proceedings. His attorneys had argued that he should not be executed due to his “severe brain damage.”

You know how in America you’re basically required to own a car? The car ownership-insurance-industrial complex likes it that way.

Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30447273

Adam Jones reads “AI” politically:

“Data centres function as an increasingly central part of the nervous system of an imperial, techno-capitalist order. Democratic politics holds the right to question their present and future existence.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.vg/post/2330763

Paywalled; archive link here.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64452424

This is the first known time an American police department has relied on live facial recognition technology cameras at scale, and is a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives.

According to The Washington Post, since 2023 the city has relied on face recognition-enabled surveillance cameras through the “Project NOLA” private camera network. These cameras scan every face that passes by and send real-time alerts directly to officers’ phones when they detect a purported match to someone on a secretive, privately maintained watchlist.

... I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.

According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?

For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why...

Archive: https://archive.is/r42Ba

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64450059

In 2012, Palantir quietly embedded itself into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department. There were no public announcements. No contracts made available to the city council. Instead, the surveillance company partnered with a local nonprofit to sidestep oversight, gaining access to years of arrest records, licenses, addresses, and phone numbers all to build a shadowy predictive policing program.

Palantir’s software mapped webs of human relationships, assigned residents algorithmic “risk scores,” and helped police generate “target lists” all without public knowledge. “We very much like to not be publicly known,” a Palantir engineer wrote in an internal email later obtained by The Verge.

After years spent quietly powering surveillance systems for police departments and federal agencies, the company has rebranded itself as a frontier AI firm, selling machine learning platforms designed for military dominance and geopolitical control.

"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”

Many people in California prisons and jails work for less than $1 an hour. Lawmakers are advancing two bills that could lead to wage increases for some of them.

France will build a new high-security prison in its overseas territory of French Guiana to house drug traffickers and radical Islamists, the country's justice minister announced during a visit to the territory.

Gérald Darmanin told Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) newspaper that the prison would target organised crime "at all levels" of the drug supply chain.

The €400m (£337m) facility, which could open as early as 2028, will be built in an isolated location deep in the Amazon jungle in the northwestern region of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni.

The plan was announced after a series of violent incidents linked to criminal gangs which saw prisons and staff targeted across France in recent months.

The prison will hold up to 500 people, with a separate wing designed to house the most dangerous criminals.

In an interview with JDD, the minister said the new prison would be governed by an "extremely strict carceral regime" designed to "incapacitate the most dangerous drug traffickers".

Darmanin said the facility would be used to detain people "at the beginning of the drug trail", as well as serving as a "lasting means of removing the heads of the drug trafficking networks" in mainland France.