Questões de Inglês

       Smart buildings: What happens to our free will when tech makes choices for us?

[1]    Smart buildings, which are central to the concept of smart cities, are a new generation of buildings in which technological devices, such as sensors, are embedded in the structure of the buildings themselves. Smart buildings promise to personalize the experiences of their occupants by using real time feedback mechanisms and forward-looking management of interactions between humans and the built environment.

    This personalization includes continuous monitoring of the activities of occupants and the use of sophisticated profiling models. While these issues spark concerns about privacy, this is a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. The questions raised by the massive arrival of digital technologies in our living spaces go far beyond this.

    Thanks to ubiquitous computing, interactions between building occupants and nested technology are quiet and invisible. As a result, the occupants’ attention is never drawn to the massive presence of computers operating permanently in the background.

    Personalization allows us, for example, to have the ideal temperature and brightness in our workspace at all times. This would be idyllic if this personalization did not come at a cost to the occupants, namely their freedom of action and, more fundamentally, their free will.

[5]    As technology increasingly mediates our experiences in the built environment, choices will be offered to us, or even imposed on us, based on the profile the building’s technology device models have created of us in function of the goals, mercantile or otherwise, of those who control them (such as technology companies).

    Having the ability to decide either to do something or not, and to act accordingly, is a basic definition of freedom. Smart buildings challenge this freedom by interfering with our ability to act, and more fundamentally, with our ability to decide for ourselves. Is freedom of action even possible for the occupants of a building where interactions between humans and their built environment are produced using algorithms that are never neutral?

    The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke’s famous analogy of the locked room sheds light on this question. Suppose a sleeping man is transported to a room where, upon awakening, he is engaged in activities that bring him great satisfaction, such as chatting with a long-lost friend. Unbeknown to him, the door of the room is locked. Thus, he cannot leave the room if he wants to. He is therefore not free, even though he voluntarily remains in the room and gets extreme satisfaction from what he is doing there.

    Locke’s analysis reflects the situation of smart building occupants. They benefit from the personalization of their experiences from which they derive great satisfaction. However, once they enter a space, technology controls their interactions outside of their awareness. While they may want to stay in the building to enjoy personalized experiences, they are not free. Smart buildings are a high-tech version of Locke’s locked room.

    Indeed, what can be said about our free will when choices are made for us by technology? An action is something we do actively, as opposed to things that happen to us in a passive way. Also, the active will to perform an action differs from the passive desire for an act to be done.

[10]    While algorithms are concerned with the predictability of human behaviour, things happen passively to the occupants of smart buildings. Their role is limited to receiving stimuli whilst the invisibility of the technology maintains their illusion that they have sole control over their actions.

    So, should we prohibit, or at least regulate, the technology embedded in smart buildings? The answer to this question takes us back to the very origins of Western democracy. Long before the Big Tech companies, the Greek Socrates was concerned with the nature of an ideal city. In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates explains that the difference between a city where citizens have all the luxuries and a city without luxuries, which he calls “a city fit for pigs,” is the ability of the residents of the former to choose their way of life, unlike the residents of the latter where this choice is simply not possible.

    Smart cities are the digital version of the luxury cities of antiquity. However, without granting their residents the ability to make informed choices about technology, they provide satisfaction at the expense of their rights. To avoid building an entire environment according to the philosophy of pigs, smart building occupants should retain the legally defined right to decide for themselves the role of technology in their living spaces. Only then can their freedom be respected.

Available at: https://theconversation.com/smart-buildings--what-happens-to-our-free-will-when-tech-makes-choices -for-us-189285. Retrieved on: June 17, 2023.

       Smart buildings: What happens to our free will when tech makes choices for us?

[1]    Smart buildings, which are central to the concept of smart cities, are a new generation of buildings in which technological devices, such as sensors, are embedded in the structure of the buildings themselves. Smart buildings promise to personalize the experiences of their occupants by using real time feedback mechanisms and forward-looking management of interactions between humans and the built environment.

    This personalization includes continuous monitoring of the activities of occupants and the use of sophisticated profiling models. While these issues spark concerns about privacy, this is a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. The questions raised by the massive arrival of digital technologies in our living spaces go far beyond this.

    Thanks to ubiquitous computing, interactions between building occupants and nested technology are quiet and invisible. As a result, the occupants’ attention is never drawn to the massive presence of computers operating permanently in the background.

    Personalization allows us, for example, to have the ideal temperature and brightness in our workspace at all times. This would be idyllic if this personalization did not come at a cost to the occupants, namely their freedom of action and, more fundamentally, their free will.

[5]    As technology increasingly mediates our experiences in the built environment, choices will be offered to us, or even imposed on us, based on the profile the building’s technology device models have created of us in function of the goals, mercantile or otherwise, of those who control them (such as technology companies).

    Having the ability to decide either to do something or not, and to act accordingly, is a basic definition of freedom. Smart buildings challenge this freedom by interfering with our ability to act, and more fundamentally, with our ability to decide for ourselves. Is freedom of action even possible for the occupants of a building where interactions between humans and their built environment are produced using algorithms that are never neutral?

    The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke’s famous analogy of the locked room sheds light on this question. Suppose a sleeping man is transported to a room where, upon awakening, he is engaged in activities that bring him great satisfaction, such as chatting with a long-lost friend. Unbeknown to him, the door of the room is locked. Thus, he cannot leave the room if he wants to. He is therefore not free, even though he voluntarily remains in the room and gets extreme satisfaction from what he is doing there.

    Locke’s analysis reflects the situation of smart building occupants. They benefit from the personalization of their experiences from which they derive great satisfaction. However, once they enter a space, technology controls their interactions outside of their awareness. While they may want to stay in the building to enjoy personalized experiences, they are not free. Smart buildings are a high-tech version of Locke’s locked room.

    Indeed, what can be said about our free will when choices are made for us by technology? An action is something we do actively, as opposed to things that happen to us in a passive way. Also, the active will to perform an action differs from the passive desire for an act to be done.

[10]    While algorithms are concerned with the predictability of human behaviour, things happen passively to the occupants of smart buildings. Their role is limited to receiving stimuli whilst the invisibility of the technology maintains their illusion that they have sole control over their actions.

    So, should we prohibit, or at least regulate, the technology embedded in smart buildings? The answer to this question takes us back to the very origins of Western democracy. Long before the Big Tech companies, the Greek Socrates was concerned with the nature of an ideal city. In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates explains that the difference between a city where citizens have all the luxuries and a city without luxuries, which he calls “a city fit for pigs,” is the ability of the residents of the former to choose their way of life, unlike the residents of the latter where this choice is simply not possible.

    Smart cities are the digital version of the luxury cities of antiquity. However, without granting their residents the ability to make informed choices about technology, they provide satisfaction at the expense of their rights. To avoid building an entire environment according to the philosophy of pigs, smart building occupants should retain the legally defined right to decide for themselves the role of technology in their living spaces. Only then can their freedom be respected.

Available at: https://theconversation.com/smart-buildings--what-happens-to-our-free-will-when-tech-makes-choices -for-us-189285. Retrieved on: June 17, 2023.

                      How life for animals changed when humans stayed home during the pandemic

[1]    Bears roaming the streets of Italy. Pumas prowling cities in California. Goats taking over towns in Wales. As people hunkered at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus in early 2020, they swapped stories online of wildlife reclaiming urban spaces outside their windows. Now a massive study of GPS tracking data on bears, deer, elephants, giraffes and some 40 other terrestrial mammals around the world confirms many animals roamed further and appeared to act more at ease without humans around.

    “It’s obvious that we’re having an impact on animal behavior,” said Marlee Tucker, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who led the study published in the journal Science on Thursday. What is more surprising, she added, is that even “small changes in our behavior could actually be quite beneficial” for wildlife.

    The unprecedented and accidental experiment that was the coronavirus pandemic allowed the ecologists to show how perceptive other creatures are to the presence of humans — and how quickly they can alter their behavior when we aren’t bothering them. The work, which involved 175 wildlife researchers, suggests new ways to protect wildlife now that the pandemic is over — without, that is, having to urge everyone to stay at home again.

    “The most striking thing was that the responses were occurring over a very short period of time,” said Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta who was not involved in writing the paper. “And it suggests that several species are very reactive to human activity.”

[5]    A growing body of research into the slowdown in human activity during the pandemic — a brief period scientists call the “anthropause” — shows the complex ways ecosystems responded when they were suddenly devoid of people. Sometimes, the absence of humans was a beneficial reprieve for wildlife. At other times, the anthropause came at animals’ detriment.

    Like a lot of the best science, it began by accident. In the years leading up to 2020, dozens of scientists around the world put tracking collars on elephants, giraffes, bears, deer, lions and other animals for their own separate research projects. At the time, none of them suspected their data would help us understand the effects of a global health crisis. But once covid began sweeping the globe, Tucker started making calls and sending emails to researchers tracking wildlife. Having spent much of her career studying wildlife movements around humans, she and her colleagues knew the pandemic was “quite a unique opportunity.”

    In total, the GPS coordinates the team gathered from 2,300 terrestrial mammals showed a wide variety of responses, but a few trends emerged. Many animals became more adventurous during the beginning of the pandemic, traveling distances up to 73 percent longer compared to the year prior in areas with the strictest covid orders.

    Although the tracked animals roamed longer distances, they moved less during short, one-hour timespans because fewer people were around to spook them. And with fewer cars on the roads, many animals also inched closer to normally bustling thoroughfares in search of food and other resources.

    “That kind of blew my mind — that kind of insidious effect of traffic,” said Amanda Bates, a biology professor at the University of Victoria who helped coin the term anthropause.

[10]    For many species, the hiatus from humans was clearly a boon. Sea turtles in Florida, for instance, appeared to thrive after beachgoers packed up their umbrellas, other researchers have shown. The same was true for turtles on the Greek island of Zakynthos. But ecosystems are complicated, with humans wittingly (or unwittingly) playing a role. For instance, researchers working to protect seabirds by ridding Gough Island in the Atlantic of invasive mice had to postpone the project during the pandemic.

    For St. Clair, the ill effects road traffic has on wildlife underscores the need for physical barriers — for the protection of both animals and the people that can crash into them. “A good solution for coexistence with wildlife, especially wildlife that can inflict injuries on people, is to have quite clear segregation,” she said.

    Another lesson of the covid closures: Sometimes it’s good just to give wildlife more space to be wild. That’s especially true during key survival moments, said Tucker, the lead author on the most recent paper. It may be good to close down, say, a beach or a forest during a migratory or breeding season “so that animals can do their thing in peace,” she said. “There could be certain times of the year that we just have to shift our behavior for a week or two.”

Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi ronment/2023/06/08/covid-lockdowns-wildlife/. Retrieved on: June 17, 2023.

                      How life for animals changed when humans stayed home during the pandemic

[1]    Bears roaming the streets of Italy. Pumas prowling cities in California. Goats taking over towns in Wales. As people hunkered at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus in early 2020, they swapped stories online of wildlife reclaiming urban spaces outside their windows. Now a massive study of GPS tracking data on bears, deer, elephants, giraffes and some 40 other terrestrial mammals around the world confirms many animals roamed further and appeared to act more at ease without humans around.

    “It’s obvious that we’re having an impact on animal behavior,” said Marlee Tucker, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who led the study published in the journal Science on Thursday. What is more surprising, she added, is that even “small changes in our behavior could actually be quite beneficial” for wildlife.

    The unprecedented and accidental experiment that was the coronavirus pandemic allowed the ecologists to show how perceptive other creatures are to the presence of humans — and how quickly they can alter their behavior when we aren’t bothering them. The work, which involved 175 wildlife researchers, suggests new ways to protect wildlife now that the pandemic is over — without, that is, having to urge everyone to stay at home again.

    “The most striking thing was that the responses were occurring over a very short period of time,” said Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta who was not involved in writing the paper. “And it suggests that several species are very reactive to human activity.”

[5]    A growing body of research into the slowdown in human activity during the pandemic — a brief period scientists call the “anthropause” — shows the complex ways ecosystems responded when they were suddenly devoid of people. Sometimes, the absence of humans was a beneficial reprieve for wildlife. At other times, the anthropause came at animals’ detriment.

    Like a lot of the best science, it began by accident. In the years leading up to 2020, dozens of scientists around the world put tracking collars on elephants, giraffes, bears, deer, lions and other animals for their own separate research projects. At the time, none of them suspected their data would help us understand the effects of a global health crisis. But once covid began sweeping the globe, Tucker started making calls and sending emails to researchers tracking wildlife. Having spent much of her career studying wildlife movements around humans, she and her colleagues knew the pandemic was “quite a unique opportunity.”

    In total, the GPS coordinates the team gathered from 2,300 terrestrial mammals showed a wide variety of responses, but a few trends emerged. Many animals became more adventurous during the beginning of the pandemic, traveling distances up to 73 percent longer compared to the year prior in areas with the strictest covid orders.

    Although the tracked animals roamed longer distances, they moved less during short, one-hour timespans because fewer people were around to spook them. And with fewer cars on the roads, many animals also inched closer to normally bustling thoroughfares in search of food and other resources.

    “That kind of blew my mind — that kind of insidious effect of traffic,” said Amanda Bates, a biology professor at the University of Victoria who helped coin the term anthropause.

[10]    For many species, the hiatus from humans was clearly a boon. Sea turtles in Florida, for instance, appeared to thrive after beachgoers packed up their umbrellas, other researchers have shown. The same was true for turtles on the Greek island of Zakynthos. But ecosystems are complicated, with humans wittingly (or unwittingly) playing a role. For instance, researchers working to protect seabirds by ridding Gough Island in the Atlantic of invasive mice had to postpone the project during the pandemic.

    For St. Clair, the ill effects road traffic has on wildlife underscores the need for physical barriers — for the protection of both animals and the people that can crash into them. “A good solution for coexistence with wildlife, especially wildlife that can inflict injuries on people, is to have quite clear segregation,” she said.

    Another lesson of the covid closures: Sometimes it’s good just to give wildlife more space to be wild. That’s especially true during key survival moments, said Tucker, the lead author on the most recent paper. It may be good to close down, say, a beach or a forest during a migratory or breeding season “so that animals can do their thing in peace,” she said. “There could be certain times of the year that we just have to shift our behavior for a week or two.”

Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi ronment/2023/06/08/covid-lockdowns-wildlife/. Retrieved on: June 17, 2023.

                      How life for animals changed when humans stayed home during the pandemic

[1]    Bears roaming the streets of Italy. Pumas prowling cities in California. Goats taking over towns in Wales. As people hunkered at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus in early 2020, they swapped stories online of wildlife reclaiming urban spaces outside their windows. Now a massive study of GPS tracking data on bears, deer, elephants, giraffes and some 40 other terrestrial mammals around the world confirms many animals roamed further and appeared to act more at ease without humans around.

    “It’s obvious that we’re having an impact on animal behavior,” said Marlee Tucker, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who led the study published in the journal Science on Thursday. What is more surprising, she added, is that even “small changes in our behavior could actually be quite beneficial” for wildlife.

    The unprecedented and accidental experiment that was the coronavirus pandemic allowed the ecologists to show how perceptive other creatures are to the presence of humans — and how quickly they can alter their behavior when we aren’t bothering them. The work, which involved 175 wildlife researchers, suggests new ways to protect wildlife now that the pandemic is over — without, that is, having to urge everyone to stay at home again.

    “The most striking thing was that the responses were occurring over a very short period of time,” said Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta who was not involved in writing the paper. “And it suggests that several species are very reactive to human activity.”

[5]    A growing body of research into the slowdown in human activity during the pandemic — a brief period scientists call the “anthropause” — shows the complex ways ecosystems responded when they were suddenly devoid of people. Sometimes, the absence of humans was a beneficial reprieve for wildlife. At other times, the anthropause came at animals’ detriment.

    Like a lot of the best science, it began by accident. In the years leading up to 2020, dozens of scientists around the world put tracking collars on elephants, giraffes, bears, deer, lions and other animals for their own separate research projects. At the time, none of them suspected their data would help us understand the effects of a global health crisis. But once covid began sweeping the globe, Tucker started making calls and sending emails to researchers tracking wildlife. Having spent much of her career studying wildlife movements around humans, she and her colleagues knew the pandemic was “quite a unique opportunity.”

    In total, the GPS coordinates the team gathered from 2,300 terrestrial mammals showed a wide variety of responses, but a few trends emerged. Many animals became more adventurous during the beginning of the pandemic, traveling distances up to 73 percent longer compared to the year prior in areas with the strictest covid orders.

    Although the tracked animals roamed longer distances, they moved less during short, one-hour timespans because fewer people were around to spook them. And with fewer cars on the roads, many animals also inched closer to normally bustling thoroughfares in search of food and other resources.

    “That kind of blew my mind — that kind of insidious effect of traffic,” said Amanda Bates, a biology professor at the University of Victoria who helped coin the term anthropause.

[10]    For many species, the hiatus from humans was clearly a boon. Sea turtles in Florida, for instance, appeared to thrive after beachgoers packed up their umbrellas, other researchers have shown. The same was true for turtles on the Greek island of Zakynthos. But ecosystems are complicated, with humans wittingly (or unwittingly) playing a role. For instance, researchers working to protect seabirds by ridding Gough Island in the Atlantic of invasive mice had to postpone the project during the pandemic.

    For St. Clair, the ill effects road traffic has on wildlife underscores the need for physical barriers — for the protection of both animals and the people that can crash into them. “A good solution for coexistence with wildlife, especially wildlife that can inflict injuries on people, is to have quite clear segregation,” she said.

    Another lesson of the covid closures: Sometimes it’s good just to give wildlife more space to be wild. That’s especially true during key survival moments, said Tucker, the lead author on the most recent paper. It may be good to close down, say, a beach or a forest during a migratory or breeding season “so that animals can do their thing in peace,” she said. “There could be certain times of the year that we just have to shift our behavior for a week or two.”

Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi ronment/2023/06/08/covid-lockdowns-wildlife/. Retrieved on: June 17, 2023.

THE POWER OF NUMBERS

By: Keith Harding and Alastair Lane

[01] There is an Indian legend that goes like this: Once upon a time, a king challenged a

pilgrim to a game of chess. The pilgrim agreed, but on the condition: if the king lost, he

would put a single grain of rice on the first chess square and then double the amount on

every square after that. The king lost and then discovered the price he had to pay: 1 grain

[05] on the first square, 2 grains on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, and so on. By

the 64th square, the amount came to more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of

rice!

A modern example of this type of growth is Moore's Law. This Law says that the power of

computer microchips doubles every 18 months. We can see the effects of this if we

[10] compare the space shuttle with a smartphone. The computer on the first space shuttle

could process 400,000 instructions per second and had a memory of 424 kilobytes; a

modern smartphone is over 35,000 times quicker and has over 33,000,000 times more

memory! These increases in computing power have caused scientific discovery to speed

up. It took the Human Genome project 13 years, from 1990 to 2003, to analyze the entire
[15] human genome*. Due to faster computers, scientists can now do this in a week. In the

next decades, computers will equal the power of the human brain. This may result in the

development of computers that are more intelligent than humans. The possible

consequences of this are profound.

The increasing speed of scientific discovery is also partly the result of larger social trends.

[20] In the 1960s in the UK, about 5% of young people went to university. Nowadays 40% of

people in the UK do a degree, whilst in Finland the number has reached 80%. Between

2000 and 2010, the number of students studying in universities abroad rose by 75%.

Because of the increase in university students, more people now do research at a

postgraduate level. This has created greater competition between research departments

[25] for funding. As a result, there is more pressure on scientists to publish their findings

quickly. This new research leads to other new discoveries and, as a consequence, new

technologies are developed more rapidly.

Fonte: Book: International Express- 3^rd edition - OUP- www.oup.com/elt

The speed of change is hard to cope with because it means we need to keep learning and adapting. But we'd better get used it: it's not going to slow down.