Hard article to read, but an important one. Here’s the thing: I know two people who own Meta “pervert glasses,” and I think if there is an innocuous use case for these glasses, they’re demonstrating it.

And yet, here’s Ellul on technical ambivalence:

And this technological nexus is characteristically ambivalent. Because the solution of one problem by technological means immediately raises a multitude of others, which result directly from those very means, it is impossible to say whether technique produces good or evil effects. It does both, simultaneously. We are confronted with a system in the strict sense of the word, what I will call the “technological system,” hence ethical issues may only be considered relative to the system as a whole, and not to specific instances.

This response is such a CEO way to apologize for something:

“It took me maybe longer than it should have to realize the sheer impact of the company,” he says. “I’m still surprised. I got our July update a week ago, and we helped find almost a thousand missing people, over 22,000 stolen cars — in July. That’s crazy. That’s such a big impact on the world. And what I came to realize over time was that the responsibility that bears with it is an obligation to make sure that it’s creating a society that we both, you and I, and everyone around us, want to raise their kids in.”

As I’ve said before, there’s something Ellulian in all of this AI/AI detection arms race. The creation of a different climate strikes me as more important than the utility (or problems) of any given tool.

This comparison crossed my mind, too, and I’m glad for this write-up.

I first encountered TTRPGs through the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars game, which was a heavily reskinned version of 3.5. I would be very tempted to pick up a Star Wars sourcebook for 5e.

Hard to pick a single killer line from this one. There’s this paragraph:

Appreciate for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product allowed customers to behave so objectionably that the company responded with a content ban, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”

And then this conclusion hits hard:

In saying the company will police the creepiest version of smart glasses content but sidestepping deeper questions, Meta is trying to have it both ways: It gets to tout its enforcement while creating the conditions for this content to exist in the first place.

Just so gross.

Walking disaster.

20,000 accounts is a hell of a “bug.”

“Scale” and efficiency aren’t always good, and digital blackface is a good example.

Uh, no.

Check this guy out:

He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

The purported inevitability is one of the most frustrating things for me about AI, and I think this shows that I’m very much not alone in that feeling. (Also, mandatory Ellul reference).

To echo a comment I made earlier today, I will always hold tech companies morally responsible for the harms they cause, but I get a lot less sure about legal responses. Do we trust this administration to handle NCII properly?

Sigh. The first paragraph here sums up my own feelings about the show, so I expect I’ll agree with the whole review about the movie:

When The Mandalorian first debuted on Disney Plus, it was a refreshing reminder of how fascinating Star Wars stories can be when they aren’t focused on the same handful of well-established characters. Especially in its first season, the series felt like a sign that Disney was shifting gears after disappointing fans with its last trilogy of big budget features. But as The Mandalorian went on, it became overstuffed with supporting characters and haphazardly-introduced lore that did little to make the show feel like must-see TV.

Here’s a gift link. Jacques Ellul argued that you can’t separate the good aspects of technique from the bad. In that context, this paragraph stands out:

Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.

Oh wait, this is worse.

This is a good example of how thorny the AI problem is, and why I strongly prefer a digital labor critique to a copyright critique. Yes, I’m mad that Meta trained their models on my work, but I don’t think the answer is to strengthen Elsevier or Cengage’s copyright claims.

I wish I knew enough about photography to really appreciate the details here, but I’m bookmarking it anyway because it feels like a contemporary, unintentional echo of observations Ellul makes in The Humiliation of the Word.

This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.

Look, I’m all for getting more cars off the road, but I’ve always been annoyed by people who use ebikes as motorcycles and not as bikes. This passage gets me thinking that I probably wouldn’t like the Olto sharing my local bike infrastructure:

I would say this is bad design, but really it is just abundantly clear that these are vestigial pedals. Legalese pedals. Pedals so you can say “but look, officer, it has pedals, it’s a bike!” They are not even remotely for pedaling. Because this is not really a bike.

Good line here:

“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”

Tim Cook is a coward.

Hashtag winning

I barely got the livestream up on time for this, but I’m glad I did, because it left me teary eyed.