I write about technology at theluddite.org
I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can’t change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks “I wonder what happens then,” and while I’m sure that there’s a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,
Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.
US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.
I know that this kind of actually critical perspective isn’t point of this article, but software always reflects the ideology of the power structure in which it was built. I actually covered something very similar in my most recent post, where I applied Philip Agre’s analysis of the so-called Internet Revolution to the AI hype, but you can find many similar analyses all over STS literature, or throughout just Agre’s work, which really ought to be required reading for anyone in software.
edit to add some recommendations: If you think of yourself as a tech person, and don’t necessarily get or enjoy the humanities (for lack of a better word), I recommend starting here, where Agre discusses his own “critical awakening.”
As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field’s taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial – except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own – that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). T
I’ve now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It’s right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site’s perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it’s certainly a very specific one, and one that I don’t particularly care for.
Even “the rot economy,” which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it’s just lacking in a theory beyond “there are some shitty people being shitty.”
I wish we had less selection, in general. My family lives in Spain, and I’ve also lived in France. This is just my observation, but American grocery stores clearly emphasize always having a consistent variety, whereas my Spanish family expects to eat higher quality produce seasonally. I suspect that this is a symptom of a wider problem, not the cause, but American groceries are just fucking awful by comparison, and so much more expensive too.
Excellent thank you very much for this.
So true! I hereby retract that antizombo slander
I like single purpose concept websites that don’t do anything. They’re the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you’re always glad that they’re there.
I’ve already posted this here, but it’s just perennially relevant: The Anti-Labor Propaganda Masquerading as Science.
I do really like the bait and switch intro strategy. I actually do that all the time in my own writing. I think that you could do that even harder using Hickel’s work as a source. Something like “Global poverty is down. Famines are going away. Things are going amazing. Except they aren’t,” then on to your stance about antinatalism. That might even open up an interesting epistemological argument to pivot: We ought to focus on what we know, not on these fragile measurements and stories, and what we do know is that people are born and will feel pain and pleasure.
As for the evolutionary disposition points, yeah those absolutely need more evidence before being used as strongly as I did, but my word limit for this was 1000-1250 and it’s sitting at like 1800 as is lol
Haha oh boy do I feel this one. I try so hard to keep my own essays under 2000 words, which is where I notice that people tend to read them a whole lot less. It’s really hard! I have no advice, since I’m terrible at this.
I do have a question, though. The problem I originally had writing this, was that it felt like a mixed-bag of poorly explained ideas from actual philosophers, with nothing original or convincing to say. I still feel like that’s largely the case, what do you think?
I actually think that’s totally fine, especially for an undergrad, but also in general. I also think about this in my own writing. I love a big new idea and feel pressure to come up with more, but sometimes that’s not what a topic needs. Sometimes things bear repeating with a new perspective, or a tweak, or a mix of other ideas. Sometimes, you just need to bring old ideas to a new audience, or repackage two relevant ideas from two places together, etc. All these things are worthy and necessary endeavors in human knowledge (re)production.
Some minor feedback on your rhetorical strategy: I think that you should reconsider your introduction. Accepting that kind of Stever Pinkeresque mainstream optimism doesn’t set up your argument very well, which is more thoughtful and much more willing to engage with subversive and controversial ideas than I thought it’d be from the intro. I especially didn’t like the law of diminishing returns bit: It’s not obvious at all why one should be able to apply a concept from classical economics about productivity to the human emotional experience. Those are pretty different things, and if you want to make that case by analogy, you’re going to have to set it up.
If it were me, I’d reframe the intro to be about how unquestioning optimism and a belief in a poorly defined “progress” is our society’s common narrative. Instead of appealing to diminishing returns to transition to your point about antinatalism, you could instead cite modern scholars like Jason Hickel who are (I think) very convincingly rebutting that narrative. That tees you up a little better to take that big step.
That’s really the main thing that jumped out to me. The only other thing that I’d say from my first pass is that you talk a lot about depression and the human tendency towards it. If I were reading this very closely, I would examine your sourcing on those points, and I would be extremely skeptical if your sources don’t include anthropologists, many of whom I suspect (though I don’t know) would take issue with that. It is true that it seems that we’re becoming more depressed, but going from there to arguing that it’s innate to humanity is, in my opinion, a big leap, even if you do cite some evolutionary reasons as to why it might be. It could that this line of thinking reifies hegemonic social conditions more than it says anything profound about humans.
Hope that helps!
Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.
“The workplace isn’t for politics” says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.
Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.
I’ve been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it’s everywhere
All these always do the same thing.
Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.
From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :
Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.
Yet here’s their conclusion :
The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.
It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.
The purpose of a system is what it does
According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.
The AI is “supposed” to identify targets, but in reality, the system’s purpose is to justify indiscriminate murder.
Other people have already posted good answers so I just want to add a couple things.
If you want a very simple, concrete example: Healthcare. It depends on how you count, but more than half the world’s countries have some sort of free or low cost public healthcare, whereas in the US, the richest country in the history of countries, that’s presented as radical left wing kooky unrealistic communist Bernie idea. This isn’t an example of a left-wing policy that we won’t adopt, but of what in much of the world is a normal public service that we can’t adopt because anti-socialism in this country is so malignant and metastasized that it can be weaponized against things that are just considered normal public services almost like roads in other countries.
A true left wing would support not just things like healthcare, but advocate for an economic system in which workers have control over their jobs, not the bosses. That is completely absent.
Also, this meme:
It’s glib, but it’s not wrong. Both parties routinely support American militarism abroad. Antimilitarism in favor of internationalism has been a corner stone for the left since the left began.
I would love to read an actually serious treatment of this issue and not 4 paragraphs that just say the headline but with more words.