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Minds For Sale: The Future of the Internet

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Commonwealth Club of California

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Mechanical Turk and the Danger of Digital Sweatshops

03 min 35 sec

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Professor Jonathan Zittrain offers some background on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace that pays small amounts of money for "human intelligence tasks." He analyzes the social implications of paying workers as little as a penny per task.
Jonathan Zittrain Predicts Web 3.0 Will Be More Human

03 min 35 sec

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Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, traces the evolution of the web from the "brochure" model to user-generated content to Web 3.0.

He says Web 3.0 will be "more human and more about living it, rather than thinking of it as some information medium like a big encyclopedia."
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01 hr 04 min 07 sec

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There are 3 comments on this program

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Previous FORAtv comments:

Mishka1

Posted: 05.14.10, 04:08 PM

His point about the turks is off base. Exploitation of labor is in most every industry offline and online. It is not a result of the internet, but it is nice to hear it brought up so people will be aware of the human rights issue.

ErgoLatin

Posted: 03.05.10, 07:34 AM

When you say that you want to stop the future of the internet I think you mean you want to stop the relinquishment of personal control over your personal computer. You used an example of grandma losing control on the computer but, frankly, I don't think full control of a computer can ever be achieved unless you fully understand it which is in the realm of UNIX people, geeks and hackers. A desktop computer which is the wizard of computing is not necessary for game maching, for example, or a refrigerator. A refrigerator does not have to run a random .exe file. It only has to run stabalize_temperature.exe so your fear of someone rogue taking grandma's refrigerator is paranoia. The future of the internet is controlled computing by limiting computing to a specific task as the Amazon Kindle is an example. The Kindle uses the internet but the internet cannot use the Kindle. What can use a consumer is the power at the other end of the internet. That relationship between you and someone else has been the raison d'etre of man's existence. If Amazon is going to abuse its end of its relationship with you then you have to fight back like man has against all opressors in history: WAR.

phiscal

Posted: 02.03.10, 03:56 PM

Phenomenal discussion! I'm not in any hurry to become a bull being led around by a nose ring. The danger that all this cheap IT poses to individual liberty appears not to be small. I hope individuals can control it, but that does seem at all apparent. Eternal vigilance, indeed, is the price of liberty. I'll wager that it'll help to be a little (or maybe a lot) over-the-top in defending it, too.

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