Skip to content

Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility

Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility

Section titled “Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility”

  • Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker’s credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue. The more desperate the nurse’s financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer.
    • Tags: #favorite
  • Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They’re the difference between a system that warns you when you’re about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.
    • Tags: #favorite
  • They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you’ve made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.
  • They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.
  • they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren’t in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.