Public responsibility is vulnerable to capital

Emory 2022-03-22 09:02:11

Human awareness of the dangers of tobacco can be traced back to the eighteenth century. It was not until the mid-1960s that the medical community reached a broad consensus on the lethality of tobacco [1]. Looking at the data in 2010, the global tobacco market is worth 760 billion US dollars (excluding China, China is about 180 billion) [2][3]. According to the latest WHO statistics, more than 8 million people still die from tobacco every year, of which 1.2 million die from second-hand smoke [4]. In fact, among drugs, tobacco is not the most harmful to society. Ranked from low to high are cocaine, methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and heroin. The top spot is alcohol [5]. Of all traffic accidents, 41% are alcohol-related [6]. Globally, 3 million people die each year from alcoholic beverages, accounting for 5.3% of all deaths. Among those aged 20 to 39, this proportion rose to 13.9% [7]. Even in small amounts, just drinking alcohol increases the risk of stroke in all categories, coronary artery disease, heart failure, brain damage, multiple types of tumors, and cancer [8]. However, the global alcoholic beverage market value in 2018 has reached 1.1%. 47 trillion US dollars [9]. Saying this under a documentary about the dangers of social networking isn't trying to dilute the film's point. What I want to stress is that changing habits is harder than changing minds. Awareness of the hazard is the first step to take, but it is not enough. Without corresponding action, even the most sensational harm will fade over time. Pre-Internet rumors such as "moderate drinking is good for health" are today a fig leaf for the vast majority of drinkers. On a social level, public health depends on the level of economic development, education, etc. But from a personal point of view, a person who opposes conspiracy theories or supports GMOs can also smoke and drink. Now that the body has been domesticated, the consciousness has no choice but to follow along with "a small drink". We can’t expect Google or Facebook to enrich our lives, just as alcohol and tobacco companies will never put consumers’ health first. Public responsibility is vulnerable to capital, and this is unlikely to change. I don't want to evaluate the good and evil of capital, because it won't help us much. Even at the individual level, it is difficult for everyone to escape the shackles of financial interests. Think about it, the harm of white garbage to the environment is also a commonplace. But in a place where free plastic bags are provided for no money, how many people will bring their own woven bags to go shopping? But I believe that society will still progress and civilization will still move forward. Thirty years ago, people were still spitting everywhere, and every New Year's fireworks were still producing yellow smoke in the sky. Today, not only have these disappeared, but in many places, smoking in public places is already a manifestation of lack of quality. There will come a day when plastic bags for shopping are incompetent, disposable tableware is incompetent, drinking is incompetent, and mobile phone use is incompetent. Although it will take a long process from realizing the action to popularizing it as a social standard and law, this does not mean that we are inactive now. When you see a public service advertisement that smoking is harmful to your health, whether to change the channel or extinguish the cigarette... When someone persuades you to drink at the dinner table, whether to kill it or push it away... When you wake up, whether to pick up the mobile phone by your pillow, or Get up and look for the sunshine outside the window... Between this thought, maybe we can make a choice? 1.http://www.toxicology.usu.edu/endnote/doll-effects-of-smoking-smmr-7-87-1998.pdf ; 2. https://www.bat.com/group/sites/UK__9D9KCY. nsf/vwPagesWebLive/DO9DCKFM ; 3. https://www.ibisworld.com/china/market-research-reports/cigarette-manufacturing-industry/ ; 4. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact -sheets/detail/tobacco ; 5. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2010/11/02/scoring-drugs ; 6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc /articles/PMC6676697/#__sec1title ; 7. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol ; 8. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/ PIIS0140-6736(18)30134-X/fulltext#seccestitle120 ; 9.https://www.statista.com/statistics/696641/market-value-alcoholic-beverages-worldwide/

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  • Justin Rosenstein - Facebook, Former Engineer: We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we're seeing the results of that. We're seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.

  • Tristan Harris - Google, Former Design Ethicist: How do you wake up from the Matrix when you don't know you're in the Matrix?