google Archives - Public Seminar

Corporations

The High Cost of Cheap Corporate Utilities

Discounted energy is a backdoor subsidy

March 30, 2023 • by Pat Garofalo

Make any utility discounts for “economic development” transparent and debatable before public bodies, if they have to be allowed at all...

The High Cost of Cheap Corporate Utilities

Artificial Intelligence

Does It Matter If Artificially Intelligent Machines Think Like Humans?

What a Victorian author can teach us about the conflict at Google over sentient AI

August 19, 2022 • by Anna Neill

Machine cognition, like that of human and nonhuman animals, may or may not become conscious cognition. That remains to be seen. But what matters is how we already harness it and who profits....

Does It Matter If Artificially Intelligent Machines Think Like Humans?

Capitalism

Can We Trust Monopolies to Play Fair?

Current debates on Big Tech and antitrust law lack a clear definition of “competition”

October 19, 2020 • by Sandeep Vaheesan

----- For the anti-monopoly movement, the past three months have been exciting but sobering. In late July, the House Antitrust Subcommittee held a landmark hearing at which members of Congress forced the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to admit to business practices they would rather have stayed private. Amazon ...

Capitalism

Big Tech May Be Closer to Home Than You Know

How digital behemoths create economically vulnerable communities — and then prey on them

October 1, 2020 • by Pat Garofalo

----- In May, 2020, the city of Gallatin, Tennessee, voted to provide nearly $20 million in tax breaks to an entity called “Project Woolhawk” that proposed building a data center in the area. Local economic development officials refused to confirm who or what was behind that name, only that it was ...