My review of @shannonvallor.bsky.social 's The AI Mirror is now up at IEEE. A profound read: "In the age of AI. . .the courage to act autonomously seems to be on the wane. Vallor, as Weizenbaum did too, seeks new metaphors for fortifying it." ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...
Maybe I need to revisit the podcast. What I recollect is he felt incredibly fond of HE and the humanities. That anecdote about his earliest memory eating Fruit Loops in the college cafeteria resonated. He treasured HE -- he was just in despair that not enuf other ppl did to sustain the humanities.
About AI generated books: Perhaps Amazon should reverse its policies by an order of magnitude: Last I checked authors were limited to uploading ~4 new books a day. The reverse seems more sensible: authors should be limited to uploading 1 new book every 4 years.
Luved this piece + Burnett's interview on Hard Fork. AI as a provocation 2 recall how the liberal arts aspire to give "shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom." Pushing back against Burnett: imo free societies rest on citizens knowing how to express themselves in public w/o the aid of AI.
Wait. . .did Victor Miller, the AI mayoral candidate from Cheyenne, move to Albania?
Here's another: "AI is like a calculator." Don't bother using other analogies (like "empire") that might better highlight the way AI extracts labor and resources from around the world.
Brilliant! Here's another "feel the agi". We want you to regard the tech as a feeling that is beyond words thereby trancending the language critical ai uses to unmask what artificial intelligence actually is.
Tom Clancy's Long Island Compromise
I'd be psyched to see a paper on Weizenbaum's relationship with Winner and/or Turkle. Do the syllabi exist? Are there any recollections from students? How involved was Weizenbaum in gen ed curricular reform at MIT?
Interesting CFP. Are we mythologizing ELIZA and/or Weizenbaum?
+ Finally I agree that the quality of discourse on Bluesky is wanting. But is X the alternative? As Margaret Mitchell reminds us in one of her last posts on that platform, X is no longer Twitter. Sometimes the medium truly is the message.
It's true we need to avoid the caricature u c in Carr. At the same time we need to avoid caricaturing tech critics as mindless narcissists channelling tech lash rhetoric. To use dana boyds formulation it's more complicated than that.
IMO Carr deserves more credit than u extend to him. His concept of miswanting comes from the empirical research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. +
U r right that Its Complicated is exemplary ethnography (as 2 her colloborator Alice Marwick's Status Update). But its not perfect. She maintains teenagers r as they have always been. Few historians who believe in change over time would make that assertion. (We talk about this in our book) +
Worthy cautions. Still, the qualification that few fit this non ideal type is important. We r currently on our 35th hour plus interview in our current research. We aspire to do the ethnography u celebrate. At the same time i still maintain along w/ Winner that AI has politics. +
"cognitive labor as a political resource". I'm interested in what that means. Sounds a bit like Richard Sennett, who argues, contra Arendt, that the practice of a technical craft is not necessarily inimical to the development of statecraft. (cf The Craftsmen)
Interesting stuff. Nice to c empirical work on this. Worth noting that the relationship btwn household work and the capacity to do politics is a question which Aristotle, Arendt and republican theorists have been interested in for a very long time. Worth drawing some connections?
2 other metaphors possibly worth adding to fuel discussion: the computer metaphor (AIs are brains are AIs) and the notion that AIs are empires (that act imperialistically).
A great document (though as a fellow instructor I feel an obligation to write my own). The point is to get students to work thru these ethical issues themselves and the analogy (metaphor?) approach u use at the end is particularly productive. Luv the mirror metaphor (esp as Vallor xplores it). +
TEACHERS: If you're looking for a reading to assign, to help explain why you're banning AI from your classroom, here ya go.
There didn't seem to be one article that rounds up all the major issues. I tried to do that here, so it's a long read. Feel free to use/share as you like.
Right on. Because citation is what authorizes truth claims. And citation is precisely what AI undermines.
Totally agree with the benefits of written note-taking for committing things to memory! Tho, recalling the Phaedrus, an even more ancient technique (recitation) arguably works even better.
@milesbrundage.bsky.social on X: "Never ask a man his salary. .or an AI company its definition of AGI" Which is why at OpenAI Sutskever rallied ppl by exhorting them 2 "feel the AGI". Like Nye's tech sublime AGI is felt rather than defined. It acts as a social glue precisely cuz its ineffable.
As Ilya Sutskever likes to say "feel the AGI"!
This is incredible
I've seen it described as AGI
A Guy Instead
As an automation engineer, we call this ‘human in the loop’ automation. 10/10, no notes.
Instead of letters, what about tweets or book reviews?
If hype is publicity that exaggerates benefits what is "overhype"? Publicity that over‐exaggerates? Or alternatively exaggerates exaggeration?
And if the roman numerals in the table of contents had titles, what would they be?
