Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmPosthumanism’s Revolt Against Responsibility2023-11-15T11:15:49+00:00
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/kirsch-revolt-gertz-post-human-transhumanism-haraway-climate
jmit is somewhat misleading to say we have entered the “Anthropocene” because anthropos is not as a whole to blame for climate change. Rather, in order to place the blame where it truly belongs, it would be more appropriate— as Jason W. Moore, Donna J. Haraway, and others have argued— to say we have entered the “Capitalocene.” Blaming humanity in general for climate change excuses those particular individuals and groups actually responsible. To put it another way, to see everyone as responsible is to see no one as responsible. Anthropocene antihumanism is thus a public-relations victory for the corporations and governments destroying the planet.
]]>technology tech posthumanism anthropocene capitalism humanity future climate-change tescrealhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d2a43f6d5964/The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance2023-09-19T08:53:20+00:00
https://www.noemamag.com/the-disappearing-art-of-maintenance/
jm[The maintainance team's] knowledge is only worth so much, however. The real challenge is creating an economic system that values labor outside of profit-driven production. Many have rightfully called for a revaluing of care work in recent years. Maintenance workers deserve a similar revival in attention — but not only that. The price mechanism, and the labor system built around it, is fundamentally opposed to maintenance, both in its narrowest practical applications and in its broadest philosophical implications. The fact that the failures of capitalism happened to encourage maintenance practices at the margins is not worth emulating, and we shouldn’t be waiting around for climate change to recreate that austerity at a global scale. It must be valued on its own terms, and that means tearing down the economic system that rejects it.
(via Keith Dawson)]]>via:kdawson maintenance repair technology infrastructure culture capitalism sustainabilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:77b18b36d291/What Will Transformers Transform? – Rodney Brooks2023-03-27T20:31:08+00:00
https://rodneybrooks.com/what-will-transformers-transform/
jmRoy Amara, who died on the last day of 2007, was the president of a Palo Alto based think tank, the Institute for the future, and is credited with saying what is now known as Amara’s Law:
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
This has been a common problem with Artificial Intelligence, and indeed of all of computing. In particular, since I first became conscious of the possibility of Artificial Intelligence around 1963 (and as an eight year old proceeded to try to build my own physical and intelligent computers, and have been at it ever since), I have seen these overestimates many many times.
and:
I think that GPTs will give rise to a new aphorism (where the last word might vary over an array of synonymous variations):
"If you are interacting with the output of a GPT system and didn’t explicitly decide to use a GPT then you’re the product being hoodwinked."
I am not saying everything about GPTs is bad. I am saying that, especially given the explicit warnings from OpenAI, that you need to be aware that you are using an unreliable system.
Using an unreliable system sounds awfully unreliable, but in August 2021 I had a revelation at TED in Monterey, California, when Chris Anderson (the TED Chris), was interviewing Greg Brockman, the Chairman of Open AI about an early version of GPT. He said that he regularly asked it questions about code he wanted to write and it very quickly gave him ideas for libraries to use, and that was enough to get him started on his project. GPT did not need to be fully accurate, just to get him into the right ballpark, much faster than without its help, and then he could take it from there.
Chris Anderson (the 3D robotics one, not the TED one) has likewise opined (as have responders to some of my tweets about GPT) that using ChatGPT will get him the basic outline of a software stack, in a well tread area of capabilities, and he is many many times more productive than with out it.
So there, where a smart person is in the loop, unreliable advice is better than no advice, and the advice comes much more explicitly than from carrying out a conventional search with a search engine.
The opposite of useful can also occur, but again it pays to have a smart human in the loop. Here is a report from the editor of a science fiction magazine which pays contributors. He says that from late 2022 through February of 2023 the number of submissions to the magazine increased by almost two orders of magnitude, and he was able to determine that the vast majority of them were generated by chatbots. He was the person in the loop filtering out the signal he wanted, human written science fiction, from vast volumes of noise of GPT written science fiction.
Why should he care? Because GPT is an auto-completer and so it is generating variations on well worked themes. But, but, but, I hear people screaming at me. With more work GPTs will be able to generate original stuff. Yes, but it will be some other sort of engine attached to them which produces that originality. No matter how big, and how many parameters, GPTs are not going to to do that themselves.
When no person is in the loop to filter, tweak, or manage the flow of information GPTs will be completely bad. That will be good for people who want to manipulate others without having revealed that the vast amount of persuasive evidence they are seeing has all been made up by a GPT. It will be bad for the people being manipulated.
And it will be bad if you try to connect a robot to GPT. GPTs have no understanding of the words they use, no way to connect those words, those symbols, to the real world. A robot needs to be connected to the real world and its commands need to be coherent with the real world. Classically it is known as the “symbol grounding problem”. GPT+robot is only ungrounded symbols. It would be like you hearing Klingon spoken, without any knowledge other than the Klingon sound stream (even in Star Trek you knew they had human form and it was easy to ground aspects of their world). A GPT telling a robot stuff will be just like the robot hearing Klingonese.
My argument here is that GPTs might be useful, and well enough boxed, when there is an active person in the loop, but dangerous when the person in the loop doesn’t know they are supposed to be in the loop. [This will be the case for all young children.] Their intelligence, applied with strong intellect, is a key component of making any GPT be successful.
]]>gpts rodney-brooks ai ml amaras-law hype technology llms futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:58171d7e3626/new LFP batteries will unlock cheaper electric vehicles2023-03-22T10:26:54+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/17/1068814/meet-the-new-batteries-unlocking-cheaper-electric-vehicles/?truid=8c8f2699f50eb3b9985a111121cfee47&mc_cid=f8693b2f71&mc_eid=eaf496ebe1
jmLithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) batteries, the type to be produced at the new [Ford] plant are a lower-cost alternative to the nickel- and cobalt-containing batteries used in most electric vehicles in the US and Europe today. While the technology has grown in popularity in China, Ford’s factory, developed in partnership with the Chinese battery giant CATL, marks a milestone in the West. By cutting costs while also boosting charging speed and extending lifetime, LFP batteries could help expand EV options for drivers.
]]>lfp technology ev cars batteries renewable-energyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0a251375dab8/Uber's still not profitable2022-08-08T14:45:00+00:00
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk
jmBut every bezzle ends. The Saudi royals – who provided much of the billions used to prop up the Uber bezzle in its first decades – cashed out with the company's IPO. The company may lure in some new suckers and delay the exodus of current bag-holders with its current fantasy of infinite price-hikes and wage theft, but that's a fantasy, too.
]]>uber business technology scams hubert-horan techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:556c6c865f70/Okuda Hiroko: The Casio Employee Behind the “Sleng Teng” Riddim that Revolutionized Reggae | Nippon.com2022-02-02T22:58:20+00:00
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g02027/
jmWhat became the Sleng Teng riddim was originally intended as a “rock” rhythm. Why did this rock beat become so popular with Jamaican musicians? Okuda says: “In those days, my head was full of reggae. Even when I was trying to come up with a rock beat, I think it just naturally came out as something that would work in reggae as well.”
]]>casio music technology sleng-teng reggae okuda-hiroko basslineshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e65a57659d08/I Thought My Job Was To Report On Tech In India. Instead, I’ve Watched Democracy Decline.2021-04-12T09:51:35+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/indian-government-using-tech-destroy-democracy
jmI love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.
]]>india technology whatsapp facebook twitter scary authoritarianism dystopia techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4fbaf295eccc/Pavement's "Harness Your Hopes" And Spotify's Algorithm - Stereogum2020-11-18T15:19:37+00:00
https://www.stereogum.com/2105993/pavement-harness-your-hopes-spotify/columns/sounding-board/
jmSpotify appears to have the capacity to create “hits” without even realizing it. When it comes to Galaxie 500, “there’s just no way this would have happened before this flip in the Spotify plays,” Krukowksi notes. “And now we’re becoming identified as a band with that song, because if they learn about the band through Spotify, that’s what they’re hearing. So it becomes, like, our emblem.”
]]>technology music spotify streaming galaxie-500 pavement autoplayhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a178fe36372b/Facial recognition technology is racist2020-06-24T10:21:07+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html
jmfacial-recognition law justice privacy faces racism technology future bias machinehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ddabdefd71ad/Opinion | Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy - The New York Times2019-12-19T14:55:14+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html?te=1&nl=the-privacy%20project&emc=edit_priv_20191219?campaign_id=0&instance_id=0&segment_id=0&user_id=7c8ff3fc774920a57c39e5d6cb28327e®i_id=020191219
jmtechnology privacy surveillance phones mobile location location-tracking tracking geohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2f425d3391e7/Hacked-Up Days2019-12-17T12:07:22+00:00
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days
jmsundial time technology history ancient-rome rome poetryhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:04654acffff1/How a new class of startups are working to solve the grid storage puzzle - MIT Technology Review2019-10-16T11:19:04+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614467/how-a-new-class-of-startups-are-working-to-solve-the-grid-storage-puzzle/
jmenergy energy-storage startups future climate-change technology batterieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b737b602643f/The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet2019-09-02T10:06:33+00:00
https://gizmodo.com/the-plan-to-use-fitbit-data-to-stop-mass-shootings-is-o-1837710691
jm“The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data,” Annas told Gizmodo. “I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? ‘Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly’? Really?” [....]
Fridel said that “literally any risk factor identified for mass shooters will result in millions of false positives,” adding that the most reliable risk factor is gender, and that most mass murderers are male. “Should we create a list of all men in the United States and keep tabs on them?” she said. “Although it would be absurd and highly unethical, doing so would be more effective than keeping a list of persons with mental illness.”
]]>dystopia technology grim-meathook-future data-protection data-privacy fitbit harpahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:59a1b5c132ea/Climate change: 'We've created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I'm terrified', writes Earth scientist2019-05-28T15:43:36+00:00
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-weve-created-a-civilisation-hell-bent-on-destroying-itself-im-terrified-writes-earth-scientist-113055
jm'At some point in the future, the technosphere could even function without humans. We worry about robots taking over human’s jobs. Perhaps we should be more concerned with them taking over our role as apex consumers.'
]]>technology ecology technosphere extinction er fear grim future automation climate-crisis climate-changehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:939c9ea0c3ab/'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism2019-01-21T17:29:41+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
jm“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”
While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users.
]]>advertising technology surveillance facebook google adtech capitalism businesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:20262504c05f/Awful AI2018-11-21T13:22:09+00:00
https://github.com/daviddao/awful-ai
jm
Artificial intelligence in its current state is unfair, easily susceptible to attacks and notoriously difficult to control. Nevertheless, more and more concerning uses of AI technology are appearing in the wild. This list aims to track all of them. We hope that Awful AI can be a platform to spur discussion for the development of possible contestational technology (to fight back!).
]]>ai algorithms ethics technology machine-learninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c4a0b7e2790f/A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - The New York Times2018-10-31T15:43:03+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html
jmJohn Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.
“I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
]]>kids technology education parenting screentime apps tech phoneshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:da2368df777e/IPCC 1.5 degrees target requires massive carbon dioxide removal technology efforts2018-10-11T11:19:13+00:00
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/5/17934174/climate-change-global-warming-un-ipcc-report-1-5-degrees
jmThe grimmest prognosis in the draft report is in the details of the effort it would take to actually limit warming to 1.5°C. Countries won’t just have to give up fossil fuels and stop emitting greenhouse gases; they’ll have to pull carbon dioxide straight out of the air.
“All pathways that limit global warming to 1.5°C with limited or no overshoot project the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR),” according to the report. And not just a little, but a lot, upward of 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by the end of the century. This will require machines that scrub carbon dioxide out of the air as well as biofuels coupled with carbon capture and sequestration. These tactics have their own energy demands and environmental drawbacks, and we may not be able to deploy them in time.
“CDR deployment of several hundreds of [gigatons of CO2] is subject to multiple feasibility and sustainability constraints,” according to the IPCC report.
]]>cdr co2 greenhouse-gases climate-change technology ipcc unhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ea71da8ebd20/The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies - Bloomberg2018-10-04T11:15:11+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
jmNested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. [...] investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
]]>chips security technology china subcontracting business hardware hacking amazon supermicro manufacturing supply-chainshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f5d79288bcaa/Common Cyborg | Jillian Weise | Granta2018-09-25T14:56:20+00:00
https://granta.com/common-cyborg/
jmWhen I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. The manifesto, published in 1985, promised a cyberfeminist resistance. The resistance would be networked and coded by women and for women to change the course of history and derange sexism beyond recognition. Technology would un-gender us. Instead, it has been so effective at erasing disabled women that even now, in conversation with many feminists, I am no longer surprised that disability does not figure into their notions of bodies and embodiment. Haraway’s manifesto lays claim to cyborgs (‘we are all cyborgs’) and defines the cyborg unilaterally through metaphor. To Haraway, the cyborg is a matter of fiction, a struggle over life and death, a modern war orgy, a map, a condensed image, a creature without gender. The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.
(Via Tony Finch)]]>via:dotat cyborg technology feminism essay disability tech jillian-weise grantahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f30af1357836/25 Years of WIRED Predictions: Why the Future Never Arrives2018-09-24T10:17:20+00:00
https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/
jmThese early views of the sharing economy were accurate depictions of the moment, but poor visions of the future. Within a few short years, many of those Uber drivers would be stuck paying off their cars in sub-minimum-wage jobs with no benefits. What began as an earnest insight about bits and atoms quickly turned into an arbitrage opportunity for venture capitalists eager to undercut large, lucrative markets by skirting regulations. To meet the growth and monetization demands of investors, yesterday’s sharing economy became today’s gig economy.
]]>advertising future technology futurism predictions wired web2.0 history 1990s 2000shttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0dc270697e06/Yelp, The Red Hen, And How All Tech Platforms Are Now Pawns In The Culture War2018-06-26T10:08:52+00:00
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/yelp-the-red-hen-and-how-all-tech-platforms-are-now-pawns#.hgVAmWjZ2
jmThough the brigading of review sites and doxxing behavior isn’t exactly new, the speed and coordination is; one consequence of a never-ending information war is that everyone is already well versed in their specific roles. And across the internet, it appears that technology platforms, both big and small, must grapple with the reality that they are now powerful instruments in an increasingly toxic political and cultural battle. After years attempting to dodge notions of bias at all costs, Silicon Valley’s tech platforms are up against a painful reality: They need to expect and prepare for the armies of the culture war and all the uncomfortable policing that inevitably follows.
Policing and intervening isn’t just politically tricky for the platforms, it’s also a tacit admission that Big Tech’s utopian ideologies are deeply flawed in practice. Connecting everyone and everything in an instantly accessible way can have terrible consequences that the tech industry still doesn’t seem to be on top of. Silicon Valley frequently demos a future of seamless integration. It’s a future where cross-referencing your calendar with Yelp, Waze, and Uber creates a service that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an appealing vision, but it is increasingly co-opted by its darker counterpart, in which major technology platforms are daisy-chained together to manipulate, abuse, and harass.
]]>culture-war technology silicon-valley yelp reviews red-hen dystopia spam doxxing brigading politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5575d03e737/What worries me about AI – François Chollet – Medium2018-04-04T16:29:52+00:00
https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704
jmOne path leads to a place that really scares me. The other leads to a more humane future. There’s still time to take the better one. If you work on these technologies, keep this in mind. You may not have evil intentions. You may simply not care. You may simply value your RSUs more than our shared future. But whether or not you care, because you have a hand in shaping the infrastructure of the digital world, your choices affect us all. And you may eventually be held responsible for them.
]]>ai facebook newsfeed technology future silicon-valley googlehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d75e2b604e0d/The world's first cyber-attack, on the Chappe telegraph system, in Bordeaux in 18342017-10-06T10:14:39+00:00
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/rewind/the-crooked-timber-of-humanity
jm
The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network.
The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.
]]>bordeaux hacking history security technology cyber-attacks telegraph telegraphes-chappehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:36e6cdfce803/Quividi - Leader in Attention Analytics2017-05-12T09:55:09+00:00
http://www.quividi.com/
jmadvertising privacy technology tracking opt-in quividi orbhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:33800d0455a1/Rule by Nobody2017-05-02T11:18:12+00:00
http://reallifemag.com/rule-by-nobody/
jmThe need to optimize yourself for a network of opaque algorithms induces a sort of existential torture. In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, anthropologist David Graeber suggests a fundamental law of power dynamics: “Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them — including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top — while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well.” This dynamic, Graeber argues, is built into all bureaucratic structures. He describes bureaucracies as “ways of organizing stupidity” — that is, of managing and reproducing these “extremely unequal structures of imagination” in which the powerful can disregard the perspectives of those beneath them in various social and economic hierarchies. Employees need to anticipate the needs of bosses; bosses need not reciprocate. People of color are forced to learn to accommodate and anticipate the ignorance and hostility of white people. Women need to be acutely aware of men’s intentions and feelings. And so on. Even benevolent-seeming bureaucracies, in Graeber’s view, have the effect of reinforcing “the highly schematized, minimal, blinkered perspectives typical of the powerful” and their privileges of ignorance and indifference toward those positioned as below them.
]]>algorithms bureaucracy democracy life society via:raycorrigan technology powerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ea027d23b579/Ethics - Lyrebird2017-04-24T20:23:53+00:00
https://lyrebird.ai/ethics
jmlyrebird audio technology scary ethicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:231b2db40556/Zeynep Tufekci: Machine intelligence makes human morals more important | TED Talk | TED.com2017-04-20T20:27:24+00:00
https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_machine_intelligence_makes_human_morals_more_important
jmMachine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains how intelligent machines can fail in ways that don't fit human error patterns — and in ways we won't expect or be prepared for. "We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines," she says. "We must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics."
More relevant now that nVidia are trialing ML-based self-driving cars in the US...]]>nvidia ai ml machine-learning scary zeynep-tufekci via:maciej technology ted-talkshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:86510676134c/Artificial intelligence is ripe for abuse, tech researcher warns: 'a fascist's dream' | Technology | The Guardian2017-03-15T11:09:31+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/13/artificial-intelligence-ai-abuses-fascism-donald-trump
jm“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.”
In the Chinese research it turned out that the faces of criminals were more unusual than those of law-abiding citizens. “People who had dissimilar faces were more likely to be seen as untrustworthy by police and judges. That’s encoding bias,” Crawford said. “This would be a terrifying system for an autocrat to get his hand on.” [...]
With AI this type of discrimination can be masked in a black box of algorithms, as appears to be the case with a company called Faceception, for instance, a firm that promises to profile people’s personalities based on their faces. In its own marketing material, the company suggests that Middle Eastern-looking people with beards are “terrorists”, while white looking women with trendy haircuts are “brand promoters”.
]]>bias ai racism politics big-data technology fascism crime algorithms faceception discrimination computer-says-nohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:29a2ef4be605/Chatbot that overturned 160,000 parking fines now helping refugees claim asylum | Technology | The Guardian2017-03-09T13:57:09+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/06/chatbot-donotpay-refugees-claim-asylum-legal-aid
jmThe original DoNotPay, created by Stanford student Joshua Browder, describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer”, giving free legal aid to users through a simple-to-use chat interface. The chatbot, using Facebook Messenger, can now help refugees fill in an immigration application in the US and Canada. For those in the UK, it helps them apply for asylum support.
]]>government technology automation bots asylum forms facebookhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:69e6fff8a2e9/Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech2016-10-04T15:35:35+00:00
http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm
jmTreating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we don't accept that this should make us accountable. We're programmers—who else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying to help. Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.
Particularly apposite today given Y Combinator's revelation that they use an AI bot to help 'sift admission applications', and don't know what criteria it's using: https://twitter.com/aprjoy/status/783032128653107200]]>culture ethics privacy technology surveillance ml machine-learning bias algorithms software controlhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c89bd2605bdf/E-Voting in Estonia needs to be discontinued2016-06-20T16:51:46+00:00
https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/
jmAfter studying other e-voting systems around the world, the team was particularly alarmed by the Estonian I-voting system. It has serious design weaknesses that are exacerbated by weak operational management. It has been built on assumptions which are outdated and do not reflect the contemporary reality of state-level attacks and sophisticated cybercrime. These problems stem from fundamental architectural problems that cannot be resolved with quick fixes or interim steps. While we believe e-government has many promising uses, the Estonian I-voting system carries grave risks — elections could be stolen, disrupted, or cast into disrepute. In light of these problems, our urgent recommendation is that to maintain the integrity of the Estonian electoral process, use of the Estonian I-voting system should be immediately discontinued.
]]>internet technology e-voting voting security via:mattblaze estonia i-voting russia cybercrimehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:28dbee81e240/Google Maps Tenth Anniversary | Re/code2015-02-10T22:13:45+00:00
http://recode.net/2015/02/08/ten-years-of-google-maps-from-slashdot-to-ground-truth/
jmgoogle history maps technology mapping recode via:anildashhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:414f4275fac7/East of Palo Alto’s Eden2015-01-11T22:52:29+00:00
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/10/east-of-palo-altos-eden/
jmWhat if Silicon Valley had emerged from a racially integrated community?
Would the technology industry be different?
Would we?
And what can the technology industry do now to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?
Amazing article -- this is the best thing I've ever read on TechCrunch: the political history of race in Silicon Valley and East Palo Alto.]]>racism politics history race silicon-valley palo-alto technology us-politics via:burritojusticehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2c8eb0956bfc/How “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls"2014-11-12T13:24:43+00:00
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D
jmAs historian Nathan Ensmenger explained to a Stanford audience, as late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
]]>history programming sexism technology women feminism codinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:36fef2348006/Yes, Isis exploits technology. But that’s no reason to compromise our privacy | Technology | The Observer2014-11-10T15:40:42+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/09/isis-exploits-technology-no-reason-compromise-privacy
jmFrom the very beginning, Isis fanatics have been up to speed on [social media]. Which raises an interesting question: how come that GCHQ and the other intelligence agencies failed to notice the rise of the Isis menace until it was upon us? Were they so busy hoovering metadata and tapping submarine cables and “mastering the internet” (as the code name of one of their projects puts it) that they didn’t have time to see what every impressionable Muslim 14-year-old in the world with an internet connection could see?
]]>gchq guardian encryption nsa isis technology social-media snooping surveillancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:27fe5cfc0208/Prototype2014-09-29T10:06:03+00:00
http://www.prototypedublin.com/
jmPrototype is a brand new festival of play and interaction. This is your chance to experience the world from a new perspective with removable camera eyes, to jostle and joust to a Bach soundtrack whilst trying to disarm an opponent, to throw shapes as you figure out who got an invite to the silent disco, to duel with foam pool noodles, and play chase in the dark with flashlights. A unique festival that incites new types of social interaction, involving technology and the city, Prototype is a series of performances, workshops, talks, and games that spill across the city, alongside an adult playground in the heart of Temple Bar.
Project Arts Centre, 17-18 October. looks nifty]]>prototype festivals dublin technology make vr gaminghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fb273bc86c92/Screen time: Steve Jobs was a low tech parent2014-09-15T10:19:11+00:00
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/screen-time-steve-jobs-was-a-low-tech-parent-1.1929304?page=2
jm“This is rule No. 1: There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever.”
]]>screen-time kids children tv mobile technology life rules parentinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:aeb2f717af75/Paul Graham and the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker2014-01-02T11:15:23+00:00
https://medium.com/p/ba8349e64e60
jmUnder Graham’s influence, Mark [Zuckerberg], like many in Silicon Valley, subscribes to the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker ideal, making self-started teenage hackers Facebook’s most desired recruiting targets, not even so much for their coding ability as their ability to serve as the faces of hacking culture. “Culture fit”, in this sense, is one’s ability to conform to the Valley’s boyish hacker fantasy, which is easier, obviously, the closer you are to a teenage boy.
Like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s role of existing to serve the male film protagonist’s personal growth, the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker’s job is to embody the dream hacker role while growing the VC’s portfolio. This is why the dream hacker never ages, never visibly develops interests beyond hardware and code, and doesn’t question why nearly all the other people receiving funding look like him. Like the actress playing the pixie dream girl, the pixie dream boy isn’t being paid to question the role for which he has been cast.
In this way, for all his supposed “disruptiveness”, the hacker pixie actually does exactly what he is told: to embody, while he can, the ideal hacker, until he is no longer young, mono-focused, and boyish-seeming enough to qualify for the role (at that point, vested equity may allow him to retire). And like in Hollywood, VCs will have already recruited newer, younger ones to play him.
]]>hackers manic-pixie-dream-girl culture-fit silicon-valley mark-zuckerberg paul-graham y-combinator vc work investment technology recruitment facebook ageism equality sexismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:946ae6588460/We're sending out the wrong signals in bid to lure the big data bucks - Independent.ie2013-12-07T22:07:26+00:00
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/were-sending-out-the-wrong-signals-in-bid-to-lure-the-big-data-bucks-29814705.html
jmLast week, during the debate of his proposals to increase fees for making a Freedom of Information request, Brendan Howlin was asked how one of his amendments would affect citizens looking for data from the State's electronic databases. His reply was to cheerfully admit he didn't even understand the question. "I have no idea what an SQL code is. Does anyone know what an SQL code is?"
Unlike the minister, it probably isn't your job to know that SQL is the computer language that underpins the data industry. The amendment he had originally proposed would have effectively allowed civil servants to pretend that their computer files were made of paper when deciding whether a request was reasonable. His answer showed how the Government could have proposed such an absurd idea in the first place.
Like it or not – fair or not – these are not the signals a country that wanted to build a long-term data industry would choose to send out. They are the sort of signals that Ireland used to send out about Financial Regulation. I think it's agreed, that approach didn't work out so well.
]]>foi ireland brendan-howlin technology illiteracy sql civil-service government data-protection privacy regulation dpahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6aea119800dc/You Lookin' At Me? Reflections on Google Glass2013-04-18T13:43:30+00:00
http://allthingsd.com/20130412/you-lookin-at-me-reflections-on-google-glass/
jmgoogle privacy technology google-glass pervasive-computing life futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:692f8d41c828/Eight Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl2012-06-25T10:24:09+00:00
http://betabeat.com/2012/06/real-tales-of-learning-computer-science-as-a-high-school-girl-stuyvesant/#slide0
jmschools learning education computer-science technology nyc girls teenagehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:41efd5693c67/First Music Contact - Music3.02012-04-23T13:11:13+00:00
http://firstmusiccontact.com/music3.0/
jmmusic future technology internet disruption music-industry ireland via:jimcarrollhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1ac9a5dffbaf/"A Rough Justice"2012-03-14T13:15:22+00:00
http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/roughjustice.cfm
jmvia:robmanuel radar technology irony robert-watson-watt poetry historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:54a9f26b25ea/Syria Bars Text Messages With Irish-Made Gear - Bloomberg2012-02-15T15:55:42+00:00
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-15/syria-blocks-texts-with-dublin-made-gear.html
jmantispam ireland repression technology syria politics cellusys adaptivemobilehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d6c382cc115b/ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS on the Behance Network2010-06-20T23:11:02+00:00
http://www.behance.net/Gallery/ALT1977-WE-ARE-NOT-TIME-TRAVELERS/545221
jmads 1970s retro technology funny via:fphttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4a248dddd907/Spinvox in trouble after BBC investigation2009-07-23T09:03:44+00:00
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8163511.stm
jmdata-protection privacy facebook bbc technology mobile transcription spinvox security south-africa offshoringhttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e502b7f616dd/Thinkism2009-07-22T11:12:41+00:00
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/09/thinkism.php
jmai singularity ray-kurzweil kevin-kelly science progress technology future philosophy intelligence knowledge thinkismhttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:24f6668fc1ab/