recommender systems
https://proto.life/2023/12/social-media-artificial-intelligence-and-the-battle-for-your-brain
- KF: human fois gras. Being force-fed content, fattened on a particular viewpoint, our subjectivities molded and shaped by algorithms driving the content being served to us.
- Google’s gavage
- A gavage of g….
- Coupled with gen-AI, becomes “here comes the airplane!”
The Three Rules of Humane Tech
Rule one: When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibility.
- You invent a new technology and that new technology confers power. That power then gets used to find some commons that wasn’t protected and exploit it, extract it. Because that’s how you maximize profits
Rule two: If the technology confers power, you start a race.
Rule three: If you do not coordinate, that race will end in tragedy as you exploit that thing.
“I also think it’s really important that people start to understand the kind of evolution of self from “I am me in this little container of Nita” versus “I am a relational being, and I exist, and my self is relational to you and relational to my environment and relational to technology.””
- KF: We have always been relational but it was easy in the past to retreat into the quietness of our thoughts, solitary and secret, to consider, in isolation, who we were. Therse days, these solitary spaces hace all but disdappeared; we are part of the digital collective, where our subjectivity is embedded within and shaped by technology; we are onlife.
“Most people’s attention goes to “What are the bad actors going to do?” But actually, it’s not just the bad actors. It’s what do rational actors do under market incentives?”
- KF: Creating a bogeyman of “Big Trech” – this is simply a name for the collective of individual shareholders who want to maximize their profit. Those who invest in weapons manufacture don’t do so because they love death and suffering; it is simply profitable to do so. Such investors, and these include “ordinary decent people”, are able to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to reconcile the investment by keeping the end result at a distance. The investment portfolio profiles they track on their screens are not blood and gore-spattered by the end user or the end result. Similarly, those who invest in mining companies might simultaneously decry the lack of progress on addressing climate change while also reaping the financial benefit of the pillaging of natural resources in countries afar. In short, it is not “Big Tech” that is behin all this; it is us. You and me and GFrandpa and Uncle Mike, and Mrs. Murphy. It is the greed is us all that, so long as we don’t look too closely, allows us to take more than we need while knowing in our heart of hear that this is wring. Seemingly a victimless crime, we participate in the gluttony of the knowledge economy. No longer content to be solely “the product” many of us are also the producer.
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Child influencers
- KF: Child stars of the past were objects of fasdcination in real-time. Some of them continued to be famous into adulthood though many others grew out of the industry as they grew up and were able to escap their old identity, letting it sediment into the past. Today’s child influencers will have a permanent record following them, the atemporality of this is fucked up.
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On the inventor’s and scientist’s social responsibility
“When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibility.
The problem is that the impact and potential of the new technology is realized before the responsibility and accompanying regulation is realized. It is in this unregulated space where “innovation” lies and where, for a time, a kind of lawlessness thrives where fortunes are made at the expense of people who will only later be identified. Such social experients, wee they subject to scrutiny alonf the lines of academic ethics regulation boards would never be permitted.
“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.
Thoughts of a Biologist”
― Jean Rostand
The idea that scale reframes the boundaries of acceptability is not new. Experimenting on all the people is somehow eminently more acceptable than experimenting on only some; the democratizing effect adds a sort of balancing salutary connotation – it can’t be wrong if it impacts everyone.
And yet, throughout history, the unintended impact of innovation has often come to be regretted by those responsible. Many of these concern inventions that became tools for war.
Others, where something positive was changed into something insidious.
In all cases, commercial interests were behind these moves.
When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibility.
- Though a relatively newly coined rule, this reads more like an adage. Every technology has had unintended consequences and has been used for purposes other than what the creator(s) intended. From Nobel to Oppenheimer, from
- Similarly, well-intentioned people have regretted developing things
- Mothers day
- Viagra
- “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the Earth. But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end,” Orville said in an article with the St. Louis Post Dispatch on November 7, 1943. “No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I the destruction it has caused.”
- Nobel: “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”
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On