I just got rotated off my grad program’s data science class, where I spent a week on the importance of theory, etc. If I were still teaching it, I’d add in this gem of a paragraph on surveillance pricing:

It’s “theory-free.” You don’t have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don’t have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you’re gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

I always pay attention to Josh’s perspective on things, and this post really stood out to me.

Bookmarking in case I need to reference this in conversation.

Just so gross.

Some insightful comments here. I don’t know if they capture the whole picture of what’s going on here, but I think they’re an important part of it.

I concede that appeals to the environmental costs of AI sometimes feel knee-jerk and lacking nuance. However, you can always count on Musk to provide a clear example of the harms of AI, and this is a particularly compelling one.

20,000 accounts is a hell of a “bug.”

Don’t love the idea of AI as coparent, but gendered divisions of labor also suck.

I don’t mind being a broken record when pointing out Ellulian vibes. Check this paragraph out:

These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

Digital labor is, imo, the fundamental problem with AI, and I think this story shows why: It’s not just the AI use here that’s exploitative, it’s kind of everything.

Uh, no.

Don’t love this.

This piece hits hard.

Another good take on Leo and Tolkien.

What wild times we live in that it sounds plausible that the pope might me throwing shade at a billionnaire with LotR references.

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.”

I think I like this pope.

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).

Very glad for 404 Media’s podcast, because I somehow missed when they published this horrifying story.

This post is hard for me. I am deeply resentful of commercial AI products, and I don’t like the idea of letting companies off the hook (at least in moral terms—I get a lot more hesitant when we start talking about specific legal responses). That said, I know the post is written in good faith, and I do think it makes some productive points. I dunno.

Embarrassed to say that this gender dynamic of AI had never really occurred to me before. Interesting read.

Shouldn’t be reading this before bed because it isn’t calming me down.

I have tried not to think too much about AI bubbles, and Doctorow captures exactly why that is in this essay.

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.

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.