onfocus

It is not the case that “AI gathers data from the Web and learns from it.” The reality is that AI companies gather data and then optimize models to reproduce representations of that data for profit. It’s worth preserving distinctions between the process behind building software systems and the social investments that aim to cultivate the human mind.

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The learning myth downplays the role of data in developing these systems, perpetuating a related myth that data is abundant, cheap, and labor-free. These myths drive down the value of data while hiding the work of those who shape, define, and label that data.

I want to quote this entire essay. So many great points about how generative AI is sold to the public to consider.

Rage suffers abuse and then decides, not that abuse should end, but that the existence of somebody else, who is also already suffering from similar abuse, represents an unacceptable existential threat, one that deserves violence.

A.R. Moxon is making a case here for a distinction between useful anger vs. destructive rage.

This overview of the historic origins of these Artificial General Intelligence boom or doom cults by Timnit Gebru should be required viewing. We have a real world with existing needs that these ideologies ignore. The result of these scifi inspired beliefs is promoting authoritarian politics. As mentioned in this video, the main question to ask: who benefits now?

See also: The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn.

Given all of this, given Trump’s increasingly explicit rhetoric about shifting the chief executive position toward authoritarianism, it seems difficult to understand how he’s still running even with President Biden in early polling — or, in some cases leading him.

My guess on why: the US is a nation with a culture of violence and toxic masculinity and many people have abusive fathers as a model for how the world works. It’s hard to break free from the familiar systems we were raised with, but it’s important to try to create (and vote for) a better world.

Do No Harm has used its small slice of the Edelmans’ wealth to launch a successful campaign against health care services for trans Americans.

So frustrating that billionaires have more than they could ever need and still look around and say: now, how can I make people suffer?

Our emotional responses to these massacres are valid. Strike while the iron, and our blood, is running hot. Let our emotions fuel the urgency of our attempts to respond with overwhelmingly popular gun control legislation, and let Republicans head into elections in two weeks opposing them.

Now is absolutely the time. The time has been now since the epidemic of shootings began. We have tried doing nothing for a long time and it's not working.

Here’s the bottom line: The techno-optimist tribe gives off the distinct impression of people who have been so ridiculously rich for so long that they’ve just completely lost the plot about how the real world works. To be fair, this is an apt description of most of Silicon Valley.

Neil Postman explained why this strain of techno utopianism is dangerous in the early 90s in his book Technopoly. We have even more evidence supporting his warnings since then. This "manifesto" displays such depressingly retrograde thinking from the people with money.

I wonder sometimes if it’s because people assume you can’t be hopeful and heartbroken at the same time, and of course you can. In times when everything is fine hope is unnecessary. Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.

I needed to hear this.

…most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism, and so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they're genius outliers who can see things others can't, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. "I must be smart, look how rich I am."

Anil on the brainworms that seem to be infecting the billionaire class. It sounds like a bizzaro normalcy bias driving extremism. Surely something would be stopping me if my views were out of bounds. But there are no bounds in our society once you have a certain amount of money.

Recently I remembered a thing that existed when I was younger: “person who does not wear a watch.” The wearing (or not) of watches wasn’t a neutral characteristic, like having blond or brown hair. The not wearing a watch was a fact that might be stated in, say, the profile of an important person or celebrity, that signified bemusement and reverence for a certain characteristic: they are unbound by time; they don’t have much concern about when they get places, or when other things happen.

Excellent thoughts by Casey Johnston on becoming less tethered by sitting with thoughts and anxieties as they come up instead of reaching for screens. Reminds me of Pema Chodron’s explanation of shenpa which I’ve found helpful.

Good prophets know how to inspire the zeal of the faithful. They don’t necessarily have the social and political nous to deal with unbelievers, or to reach grudging but necessary accommodations with them. Often, indeed, disagreement is treated as being tantamount to heresy. Nor are prophets good at working with routines, which are antithetical both to their self image and their style of operation.

I have been thinking about this priest and prophet dichotomy since I read this post and I'm seeing it everywhere. It's like the tension between tech innovation and maintenance personified. Plus the phrase routinization of charisma has been giving me good brain dissonance.

Gun policies, I argue, are downstream from culture, so it’s not surprising that the regions with the worst gun problems are the least supportive of restricting access to firearms. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of 61 to 36, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region — the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky — supported gun rights by exactly the same margin.

Interesting look at the roots of regional attitudes about guns from the author of American Nations about the different groups that settled America and their differing beliefs.