For episode 10, I am joined by Dr. John Danaher to talk about social credit systems, the ubiquity of ranking metrics, whether or not its possible to go “off the grid,” and “Nosedive” (Season 3, Episode 1 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2016.
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This episode’s guest, John Danaher, is a lecturer in the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway and an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. John’s
research deals primarily with the ethical, social and legal implications of emerging technologies, but dances around some other philosophical topics. He has written about social robots, the risks of advanced AI, the meaning of life and the future of work, the ethics of human enhancement, the intersection between law and neuroscience, the utility of brain-based lie detection, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of religion. John is a prolific blogger at Philosophical Dispositions, and he hosts an excellent podcast (also titled “Philosophical Disquisitions.”)You can listen to our discussion of “Nosedive” in its entirety below:
Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:
- John Danaher, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019)
- The General Data Protection Act (GDPR)
- Nicole Kobe, “The complicated truth about China’s social credit system” (from Wired)
- Louise Matsakis, “How the West got China’s social credit system wrong” (from Wired)
- Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (Basic Books, 2012)
- Alexis de Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority
- Plato, Republic, Book VIII
- Colleen Flaherty, “Study: Student evaluations of teaching are deeply flawed” (from Inside Higher Ed)
- John Danaher, “Measuring What Matters: On the Tyranny of Academic Metrics”
- Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton UP, 2018)
- Paul Prinsloo, “And then everything turned to beige… the quantified academic in an age of academic precarity”
- Ole Martin Moen on the Unabomber’s Ethics (Philosophical Disquisitions podcast, Episode 51)
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods
- Plato, Phaedrus
- Trustpilot (“the world’s most powerful review platform”)
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