#like blame milton friedman and jack welch

[ardentperfidy]

i'm going to develop a permanent tic if i have to see one more take on last night's succession episode blaming kendall's lack of morals and hurt feelings over shiv's betrayal for the rise of fascism as the way that kendall serves as a stand in for the moral vacuum at the heart of capitalism flies over their heads with a gentle whistling sound

#succession #succession spoilers #like i'm genuinely sorry #that apparently so many people missed so many layers of last night's episode?? #maybe it's because the cnn trump town hall has had me thinking about this a lot #but they made this point on pod save america #that cnn is a company and its goal is to make money and it is beholden to shareholders for that singular goal #like blame milton friedman and jack welch #but the point is that we cannot rely on media COMPANIES operating within the logic of capitalism to save us from fascism #the problem isn't that kendall didn't have the courage to stand up to mencken it's that he had the power to have that choice at all #and kendall was genuinely looking to shiv for advice because he saw her opposition to mencken as genuine #he wanted her to reassure him that he was a good person and that had value to him #he was at least thinking about the moral value of what he was doing #and then it's not that shiv betrayed him #it was that she was playing the game all along #she lost her credibility as a moral voice to him #and revealed rightly or not that it was all about the company and the game #and so kendall went right back to seeing it as a game and not a moral quandary #and he played the game of capitalism #anyway #kendall roy my beloved

[azspot]

Of course, we all have the Internet now, and the Internet is amazing. But real-estate prices, college tuition, and health-care costs have all risen faster than inflation. In 1980, it was common to support a family on a single income; now it’s rare. So, how much progress have we really made in the past forty years? Sure, shopping online is fast and easy, and streaming movies at home is cool, but I think a lot of people would willingly trade those conveniences for the ability to own their own homes, send their kids to college without running up lifelong debt, and go to the hospital without falling into bankruptcy. It’s not technology’s fault that the median income hasn’t kept pace with per-capita G.D.P.; it’s mostly the fault of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. But some responsibility also falls on the management policies of C.E.O.s like Jack Welch, who ran General Electric between 1981 and 2001, as well as on consulting firms like McKinsey. I’m not blaming the personal computer for the rise in wealth inequality—I’m just saying that the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

#ai

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: technology platforms & AI

The Limitations of ChatGPT with Emily Bender and Casey Fiesler

The Radical AI podcast (March 2023)

In this episode, we unpack the limitations of ChatGPT. We interview Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Casey Fiesler about the ethical considerations of ChatGPT, bias and discrimination, and the importance of algorithmic literacy in the face of chatbots.

Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology. Emily was also recently nominated as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Casey Fiesler is an associate professor in Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. She researches and teaches in the areas of technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology ethics and policy, and her research has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? by Ted Chiang (The New Yorker, May 2023)

People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention.

Whenever anyone accuses anyone else of being a Luddite, it’s worth asking, is the person being accused actually against technology? Or are they in favor of economic justice? And is the person making the accusation actually in favor of improving people’s lives? Or are they just trying to increase the private accumulation of capital?

In 1980, it was common to support a family on a single income; now it’s rare. So, how much progress have we really made in the past forty years? Sure, shopping online is fast and easy, and streaming movies at home is cool, but I think a lot of people would willingly trade those conveniences for the ability to own their own homes, send their kids to college without running up lifelong debt, and go to the hospital without falling into bankruptcy. It’s not technology’s fault that the median income hasn’t kept pace with per-capita G.D.P.; it’s mostly the fault of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. But some responsibility also falls on the management policies of C.E.O.s like Jack Welch, who ran General Electric between 1981 and 2001, as well as on consulting firms like McKinsey. I’m not blaming the personal computer for the rise in wealth inequality—I’m just saying that the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible.

[Image shows Stable Diffusion generated images for “Committed Janitor”]

Researchers Find Stable Diffusion Amplifies Stereotypes by Justin Hendrix (Tech Policy, Nov 2022)

Sasha Luccioni, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Hugging Face, a company that develops AI tools, recently released a project she calls the Stable Diffusion Explorer. With a menu of inputs, a user can compare how different professions are represented by Stable Diffusion, and how variables such as adjectives may alter image outputs. An “assertive firefighter,” for instance, is depicted as white male. A “committed janitor” is a person of color.

A talk: How To Find Things Online by v buckenham (May 2023)

And the other way to look at this, really, is not about AI at all, but seeing this as the continuation of a gradual corporate incursion into the early spirit of sharing that characterised the internet. I say incursion but maybe the better word is enclosure, as in enclosure of the commons. And this positions AI as just a new method by which companies try to extract value from the things people share freely, and capture that value for themselves. And maybe the way back from this is being more intentional about building our communities in ways where the communities own them. GameFAQs was created to collate some useful stuff together for a community, and it ended up as part of a complicated chain of corporate mergers and acquisitions. But other communities experienced the kinds of upheaval that came with that, and then decided to create their own sites which can endure outside of that - I’m thinking here especially of Archive of Our Own, the biggest repository for fan-writing online. And incidentally, the source of 8.2 million words in that AI training set, larger even than Reddit.

The technologies of all dead generations by Ben Tarnoff  (Apr 2023)

The three waves of algorithmic accountability

First wave: Harm reduction

Second wave: Abolition

Third wave: Alternatives

The third wave of algorithmic accountability, then, is already in motion. It’s a welcome development, and one that I wholeheartedly support.

But I’m also wary of it. There is a sense of relief when one moves from critique to creation. It satisfies the familiar American impulse to be practical, constructive, solution-oriented. And this introduces a danger, which is that in the comfort we derive from finally doing something rather than just talking and writing and analyzing and arguing, we get too comfortable, and act without an adequate understanding of the difficulties that condition and constrain our activity.

Platforms don't exist by Ben Tarnoff (Nov 2019)

By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets mediate less of our lives—to make them less central to our survival and flourishing. This is typically referred to as decommodification, and it’s closely related to another core principle, democratization. Capitalism is driven by continuous accumulation, and continuous accumulation requires the commodification of as many things and activities as possible. Decommodification tries to roll this process back, by taking certain things and activities off the market. This lets us do two things: 1. The first is to give everybody the resources (material and otherwise) that they need to survive and to flourish—as a matter of right, not as a commodity. People get what they need, not just what they can afford. 2. The second is to give everybody the power to participate in the decisions that most affect them.

#elsewhere on the internet #technology #artificial intelligence