Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo, has two tips for learning a language. The first is to accept the cold reality that it takes time and work. “The more time you put in the better. It’s not magic,” he tells i.The second piece of advice is to use your target language while abroad – don’t surrender to embarrassment by reverting to your native tongue.
“I suffer from this,” Von Ahn admits. “I’m very ashamed – when I’m not nearly perfect in a language, I don’t want to talk because I feel like you’re going to judge me.”
He adds: “The people we’ve seen that are best at learning a language are the ones that don’t care about sounding stupid.”
It comes from a longer piece:
The crisis in language education across the UK — what it means for schools and the future of business
Britain is bottom of the class when it comes to second languages. Will Hazell asks why learning the lingo remains so foreign to us
Can anything be done about our struggles? Or should we lighten up about it? A former Downing Street education expert has told i that seriously improving our language ability is not a high-enough priority to justify the vast expense involved.
In Britain, 34.6 per cent of people aged between 25 and 64 report that they know one or more foreign language, compared with an EU average of 64.8 per cent.
WHEN HBO ANNOUNCED it was making a movie of Fahrenheit 451, it was a bit of a headscratcher. Ray Bradbury’s novel depicts a society gone numb on endless loops of home entertainment. Why would HBO, the nation’s great pioneer and name-brand purveyor of endless loops of home entertainment, produce a devastating critique of itself—that is, of television, a medium that Bradbury went to his grave calling an “insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night”?
Only one answer was imaginable: HBO would do no such thing. It would instead gut Fahrenheit of its core idea, Kill Your TV, and remix the dystopia as an extended, slightly edgy ad for Barnes & Noble Classics. The network would switch out the primacy of the story’s ubiquitous television screens in favor of non-screen, non-entertainment gadgets like smart speakers. A remake along these lines would be roughly akin to a GlaxoSmithKline production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that used non-pharmaceutical stand-ins for the futurist all-purpose narcotic that Huxley called soma. In both cases, the deviations would serve to soften or remove any unsettling echoes with the latter-day cognates of the original plots—mood-enhancing drugs in Huxley’s case, and “peak TV” in Bradbury’s.
HBO did indeed deliver a Fahrenheit devoid of television—a Jaws without the shark. In the script written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, Bradbury’s “insidious beast” barely makes an appearance, much less turns anyone to stone. Cut from the story is a central character, Guy Montag’s TV-addicted wife, Mildred, who spends her waking hours engrossed in interactive serial dramas displayed on three giant “parlor” screens. In the original 1953 novel, Montag is distraught but resigned to the fact that “No matter when [he] came in, the walls were always talking to Mildred.” It’s during one of his wife’s regular viewing parties that Guy finally snaps, setting him on course to torch his boss with a flamethrower and flee the city’s boundless warren of living-room home box offices.
François Truffaut faithfully reproduced this pivotal scene in his 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit, but the HBO version finds Montag curiously unmarried. The holographic parlor screens in his tranquil space-age bachelor pad appear only briefly; they feature no loud sitcoms or dramas, but a series of stills from a search on the history of firemen. In the monitor built into the bathroom mirror, a futuristic social media feed displaces the dramatic fare spit out by the televisions of the original story. Other depictions of indoor screens in the HBO remake are few, notably including a vintage Zenith-style turn-dial used by a resistance cell to screen video manifestos.
None of the critics who mostly panned the remake found it odd that HBO’s Fahrenheit presents a TV set as a symbol of the Resistance. Then again, since they most likely regard 30 Rockefeller Plaza as a strategic bunker in their own Trump-age version of the Resistance, why would they?
And here are some nice references to other stuff on TV from the same article above:
It was Hollywood that provided some of the first pointed attacks on its upstart rival for America’s attention. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit depicts the living room TV as a self-aware episode of The Twilight Zone might have done—as a hypnotizing, violent, undifferentiated disturbance. “Kick that television in,” says Frederic March. “Kick it in and stomp it if it gets in the way of the family... Then there was the retarding influence of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian celebrity academic who served as a hype-man for television throughout the decade. McLuhan famously believed sitting in front of television made people active participants in a shared drama, one told over the giant campfire of a global electronic village. He didn’t care much about this drama’s content or its sponsors, or that everyone in the audience was sitting alone in a dark room staring at a box, subjected to a stream of manipulative ads. McLuhan thought television’s visual immediacy, its “coolness,” made it inherently revolutionary... In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron released the legendary proto-rap track, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which was soon followed by The Mothers of Invention’s “I’m the Slime,” in which Frank Zappa intones, “You will obey me while I lead you / And eat the garbage that I feed you. . . Have you guessed me yet? / I’m the slime oozin’ out from your TV set.”...
Marie Winn published the first critical investigation of television as a medium. Because so little research existed on the subject, The Plug-In Drug relied mostly on anecdote, interviews and conjecture. But its conclusions—that television was addictive, increased aggression, slowed cognitive development, decreased test scores, weakened families and enervated the innate human ability to play, to amuse ourselves, to sit still and fill our minds with our own thoughts—resonated with a national audience who suspected she was right, even if no one had ever made the case. The book was a bestseller.
A year later, Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television offered a deeper, more radical critique, correcting what Mander called Winn’s failure to apply her findings “to the power drives of the wider society.” These were drives Mander understood well. He wrote as a repentant enabler of the TV plague after fifteen years as an ad and public relations man, including five years as the president of the San Francisco advertising agency Freeman, Mander & Gossage. His own Montag-like snap came during a 1968 cruise through the Dalmatian Straits, when he attempted to appreciate a brilliant natural scene before him—“rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky, and colors as bright as a desert”—and realized he couldn’t. “I felt nothing,” he writes. “Something had gone wrong with me.” That something was television...
Mander framed Four Arguments around the planet’s deepening ecological emergency. The reigning paradigm of consumption and growth could not be questioned, let alone disrupted, he argued, so long as television was setting the terms of our thoughts and debates, not to mention limiting our very ability to think and debate. Four decades later, Mander’s arguments hold up all too well.
A sustained burst of anti-TV books followed the salvos by Winn and Mander. In his 1979 broadside against the terminal self-involvement of postwar American life, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch referenced television often. The following year, Vance Packard updated his Eisenhower-era expose of television advertising, The Hidden Persuaders. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death warned that the West was entering the screen-and-pill entertainment coma described in Huxley’s Brave New World.[3] In 1986, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting began publishing its newsletter, Extra!, which continues to valiantly catalogue every new reason to avoid commercial broadcast news. In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent, a narrow but damning study of the structural biases of the major networks’ news departments. [4]
In 1992, Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information dug into the link between television and humanity’s accelerating glide-path toward environmental ruin. McKibben’s previous book, The End of Nature, had laid out the new science of climate change. Missing Information explored how TV made the changes mandated by the grim findings of environmental science difficult, if not impossible, to realize. The book was structured as a kind of diary documenting McKibben’s viewing of well over one thousand hours of cable television—nearly every minute of programming on 93 channels during a 24-hour period—and then comparing the experience with sitting on a remote mountaintop in the Adirondacks observing nature and contemplating humanity’s place within it. The result is a personal account of how the chaotic and never-ending “flow” of television cracks and cheapens our experience of the world, destroying our ability to form coherent narratives about what we are, and should be, doing here. Even after we shut the TV off, we are unable to process the information we most need to educate ourselves about “the physical limits of a finite world. About sufficiency and need, about proper scale and real time, about the sensual pleasure of exertion and exposure to the elements, about the need for community and for solid, real skills. About the good life as it appears on TV, and about other, perhaps better lives.”
It’s hard to imagine now, but the rise of on-demand and mobile platforms for TV content did cause a panic among those with stakes in the old television order. Beginning in 2010, viewing time in U.S. households started to dip for the first time since Nielsen began keeping track. It seemed possible that the “fourth screen” in our pockets—with its expanding universe of apps and streaming services—might weaken television’s long deathlike grip on our national attention, if only by replacing a mother source of commercial distraction with a million little ones. [5]
Alas, the panic was short-lived. Corporations quickly learned to control this new world and accomplish even deeper levels of “brand penetration” on a terminally distracted, screen-addled public. In 2013, a team at Innerscope Research, a marketing firm, published an article announcing the good news in the Journal of Advertising Research. The piece had a lurid Huxleyan title that no doubt would have caused Neil Postman, who died in 2003, to break out into a knowing grin: “Leveraging Synergy and Emotion In a Multi-Platform World: A Neuroscience-Informed Model of Engagement.” The researchers explained that, rather than threatening the power of television, a “flexible media environment” can actually facilitate “activation of brand associations from previous exposure across platforms.” ...
Our imaginations can no longer absorb a narrative in which Guy Montag is the hero, television the enemy, and his wife the tragic warning. The portals to this world were never on center stage, but they existed, in newsstands and zine racks, in books, in leaflets, in the boomboxes of high school parking lots. HBO, which has done more than most to make this world vanish, did nothing brave with its production of Fahrenheit 451. By scrubbing TV from Bradbury’s story, it papered over its own pixelated reflection and ours, sparing us from reckoning with the fact that we are all Mildred Montag now.
How Some Billionaires Are Preparing For The End Of The World (Hint: It Doesn’t Include Us)
Technology Vs. Humanity
The ironic thing is that many of the titans of the technology industry are now facing the fact that the very technologies that have made them wealthy are making the world a less human—or at least certainly less humane—place to live. While some of them are just planning their post-doomsday escape, others are coming to grips with the pain and devastation left in the wake of their industries. They’re becoming aware of all the little fingers that are lost in Chinese factories or of the boys sent into the mines in the Congo to get the rare-earth metals for our smartphones. They’re becoming aware of the detrimental effects on American children who are living more virtual lives rather than real lives, with their heads buried in their iPhones all day.
It’s interesting that many of the people who have created all this technology do their best to keep their own children away from it. They make the smartboards and iPad programs for kids to use in public schools, but many Silicon Valley parents send their own kids to a Rudolf Steiner or Waldorf school and don’t let them watch television.
Join Team Human
Douglas believes that the solution lies in refocusing on the basic value of humanity, a value that vastly transcends any amount of money that the markets can generate. He noted that in old sci-fi shows like Star Trek, humans were the heroes and being human was the very thing that made them the heroes. Even with our flaws and emotionality, humans were interesting and had heart. Humans would do the illogical, weird thing that would beat the aliens. But in more recent shows such as Westworld, humans are the problem, not the solution.
But Douglas doesn’t subscribe to that bleak view of humanity. Being human isn’t about trying to make your individual escape from the “zombie apocalypse.” It’s about realizing that whatever future we humans have, it will be together. And that’s the theme of his new book, Team Human, which is all about regenerating our bonds to affect positive societal changes.
To learn more, you can read Douglas’ article, “The Survival of the Richest”, here, or take a look at his new book here.
Professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recently penned an article that went viral, “Survival of the Richest.” It outlines how the super wealthy are preparing for doomsday. Here is a recap followed by a brief commentary.
Rushkoff was recently invited to deliver a speech for an unusually large fee, about half his academic salary, on “the future of technology.” He expected a large audience but, upon arrival, he was ushered into a small room with a table surrounded by five wealthy men. But they weren’t interested in the future of technological innovation. Instead, they wanted to know things like where they should move to avoid the coming climate crisis, whether mind uploading will work and, most prominently, how to “maintain authority over [their] security force after the event?”
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
Rushkoff continues by expressing his disdain for transhumanism.
The more committed we are to this [transhuman] view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles.
Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.
The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.
It is such thinking that leads the tech billionaires to want to escape to Mars, or at least New Zealand. But “the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.”
For his part, Rushkoff suggested to his small audience that the best way to survive and flourish after “the event,” would be to treat other people well now. Better act to avoid social instability, environmental collapse and all the rest than to figure out how to deal with them in the future. Their response?
They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.
But for Rushkoff:
We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.
Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
If you are reading this, then you are probably useless. I have just finished reading The Economic Singularity by Calum Chace. He describes a future where the Economic Singularity happens before the Technological Singularity. It is a world where we go from where the current 1% of the world who owns 50% of the world’s wealth to something worse. The few who own the AI will be able to afford the transhumanist advancements and rest will be unemployed. It will be Universal Basic Income (UBI) to the rescue but the AIs will work out that the best way to stretch UBI would be to create simulated worlds for the useless and employ a blocking agent to ensure they believe their simulated 2018 is real. This should keep the dogs of discontent quiet and away from the rich “Gods” as they enjoy a less congested world with AI systems not only serving them, but also keeping the rest out of the way while they start to clean up the environmental mess we have created. Put a layer of Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis on top and this has already happened. Hello fellow useless being! What changes all this is if the simulations are more meaningful than the “reality”. Then even the rich may want to live in the simulation. Maybe they will want privileged positions where they still have lots of money, know it is a simulation and can build rockets to mars etc. The crux of question of whether the simulated life is valuable depends on whether you believe your soul is external to your simulation avatar (in this simulation and the simulation layers above). If this scenario is accurate, then your soul does exist outside of this reality and there is no reason why it should not exist outside of upper level simulations. If the events and responses in the simulation define and hopefully refine your soul, then it does not matter where you are in these nested simulations and there may be light at the end of the tunnel for we, the useless. For more detail on this scenario, please look up my book on Amazon – The Word of Bob – an AI Minecraft Villager.
My new book The Economic Singularity argues that in the next few decades most humans will become unemployable because machines (AI systems plus their peripherals, the robots) will be able to do anything that we can do for money cheaper, faster and better. And unlike us, their capabilities will be improving all the time. At an exponential rate, if not faster.
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?
... all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals....
