Franklin Foer Quotes
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Once upon a time, if you were going to get a loan from me, I would have had to look at your file, and I would have to make a decision about whether youre going to get a loan. Maybe we would meet and talk about it. There would be some level of human involvement and human interaction. Now, a lot of this is determined by an algorithm.
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In 2012, Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency after a four-year, constitutionally imposed hiatus. It wasn't the smoothest of transitions. To his surprise, in the run-up to his inauguration, protesters filled the streets of Moscow and other major cities to denounce his comeback.
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Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors.
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Along with Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our 'personal assistant.' They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days, and never quite leave our sides.
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Gay marriage is a divisive issue in France, where Fillon has vowed to block adoption by same-sex couples. The battle against Islamism also remains a rallying cry; Fillon's campaign manifesto is called 'Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism'.
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We've been merging with tools since the beginning of human evolution, and arguably, that's one of the things that makes us human beings.
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When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn't really think too much about that.
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In mid-2014, 51 percent of American Republicans viewed Putin very unfavorably. Two years later, 14 percent did. By January, 75 percent of Republicans said Trump had the 'right approach' toward Russia.
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Of course, formulas always existed in journalism. When I was just getting into the business, 'Time' and 'Newsweek' knew if they could put Jesus' face on the cover that it would do really well on the newsstands. So every year, they would put Jesus' face on the newsstand. There was a formula there.
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One of Trump's vulnerabilities is that he doesn't always vet his people, whether it's business partners, the dubious characters he retweets, or the foreign leaders who show up at his door.
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If you think of data as kind of an x-ray of our soul, it's this window into our minds that the company has possessed. It's a very, very powerful x-ray for them to hold because the more that you understand about somebody, the easier it is to manipulate them.
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In the epic war over Silicon Valley's intellectual property, Bill Gates was on the side of licensing copyright and robust protections for intellectual property. He wasn't on the side of the hackers, and he didn't want information to be free.
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Trump is a real estate guy who sucks up to power to get buildings built.
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Brazil is a country largely resistant to ideology. This is a strange fact given its founding by followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who inscribed an epigram from his philosophy of positivism in the national flag: Order and Progress.
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I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it's much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.
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If you're presented with choices that steer you toward your worst instincts, that's what you'll choose. If I'm presented with Snickers bars, I won't necessarily seek out kale.
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The greatest miracle of the Internet is that it exists - the second greatest is that it persists.
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Trump uses the phrase 'America First,' only dimly aware that he is repeating a phrase from the interwar years and indifferent to its historic resonances. But he compulsively echoes that period - another time when leaders described the world in apocalyptic terms.
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There's this proud American tradition of worrying about the power of communication companies. That going all the way back to the founding, we've tried to limit the power of monopolies that played a role in our democracy.
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If I'm reading my Facebook feed, it's using algorithms, procedures, and methods to give me what I want, or what it thinks that I want, or what suits its business plan.
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When Trump started belittling him, Jeb reverted to Bush form. He couldn't understand how anyone could question his noble pursuit of public service. In the face of Trump's attacks, he looked hurt and stunned.
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Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions. The search engine is one of the greatest inventions in human history.
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What I worry about ultimately is that when we're stripped of our privacy, when we're stripped of free will, when we start to merge with machines in a more robust way, at some point, we'll cease to be identifiably human. And therefore, I think our humanity is, in some ways, the thing that's under existential threat.
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Self-publishing is fine. But in a world of self-publishing, where everything is about what you get on the back end, there's a serious disincentive from embarking on really important, vital projects.