If I were running a dystopian surveillance company centered on "urban blight", I wouldn't have my photo taken in front of Dallas City Hall, which was the headquarters of OCP in the Robocop films. Dead or alive, irony is coming with me.
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Type of guy who cosplays his software having feelings in order to avoid feeling personally responsible for how it was used to murder children is an increasingly common kind of guy in the software industry
The product, which Baum-Blake has patented, has some fun and essential features. The latter is that faces and license plates are always blurred for privacy reasons; the former is that City Detect’s technology can distinguish between street art and vandalism. It also helps governments track whether landlords are not properly maintaining their buildings.
Do tell.
“…the company was founded in part because cities were struggling to deal with ‘urban blight and decay.’ The idea was to use advanced computer vision and AI technology to help cities track and fix such problems.”
California CCs get so little funding as it is (roughly a third of K-12), yet this is what they're choosing to fund?! Many students can't even matriculate after 2 years because there aren't enough professors to teach the needed number of courses! This really pisses me off!
Think about all the times companies have lied about the extent to which they surveill people—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. Now in the name of “ai” knowing you, they just say out loud “yeah we want to know every intimate detail of your life.”
Amon also laid out why he was “bullish” on smart glasses, saying they were “close to our eyes, close to our ears, close to our mouth, we’re going to have those agentic experiences and workloads.” “Agentic” refers to AI applications that can carry out tasks on users’ behalf autonomously. Device makers have talked up a world where users may be able to ask their AI agents to call a cab or book a hotel. The things users once did on their phones and laptops will shift to other devices like smart glasses, Amon said. He likened the current state of smart glasses to the early days of smartphones when there were far fewer apps available.
Again, I think it’s an explicit shift that tech folks now openly say they want to see and hear everything you do and track you everywhere you go. Of course, they have been attempting this for a long time, but they mainly tried to hide this rather than state it as the explicit goal.
They want to get rid of faculty so bad, they are like slavering at the prospect
“Acknowledging limitations, community college districts justify the costs by pointing to heavy student use, which would cost significantly more if performed by call center staff around the clock.”
This was LITERALLY the plot of classic sci-fi novel Simulacron 3 by Daniel F. Galouye and the groundbreaking German miniseries “World on a Wire” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Like literally the whole reason for building it was to figure out - through simulated people - how to market to real people.
“In testing by CalMatters, they [the chatbots] often answered general questions correctly but struggled with more specific ones. East Los Angeles College’s bot couldn’t even correctly name its own president.”
Nice timing for @mjcrockett.bsky.social and my article on AI Surrogates and Illusions of Generalizability to be officially published. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
(because i live in hell) i am giving a talk on how to (not) use LLMs in your products. a big section is 'don't use LLMs for things you can do with other tools better'. we already know how to run simulations (with AI even) why use an (expensive!) LLM?
As I get older I’m coming to increasingly radical views like “eradicating peoples jobs is bad, actually” and “a necessary part of having skills is taking responsibility for the outcomes of those skills”
“AI-generated people have also been put to work in other areas like clinical trials, focus groups, even modeling clothing.” 🫠
Agents “are essentially digital clones of real individuals, who are interviewed to gather their preferences, personality and other traits. Simile then combines that data with participants’ behavioral and purchase data to ensure ‘generalizability and visibility into people’s thoughts and behaviors’”
#BrainrotPropaganda: You take the patriotic imagery of the past and strip it of all content. There's no narrative left, no promise of meaning, only vibes. The total destruction of meaning is the content, no matter if it's AI generated or manually stitched together from YouTube clips
#MemeFascism
Text from OpenAI article on its educational programs: "Agency does not emerge from basic AI use alone. Students must progress from simple tasks to deeper applications such as studying, building, creating, coding, and managing agents. But among college-age users, we see a widening global “capability overhang,” defined as the gap between what AI tools can do and how people actually use them. Even advanced student users still operate roughly 90% to 99% below how power users of ChatGPT are engaging with our tools. Educational institutions play a central role in closing that gap. Faculty and educators can help students harness AI’s full potential by embedding authentic AI use cases into coursework—assignments that use AI and mirror real professional work, such as analyzing a market, designing a product concept, evaluating a policy trade-off, or building a simple agent"
Shouldn't let OpenAI puff about education get to me, but its claim students need AI skills for future jobs and "agency", then letting slip it really means making students into GPT "power users", and making that an educational imperative, *and* planning to measure it ... 😦 openai.com/index/ai-edu...
Countdown to launch. T-minus 10 days (but your book will arrive before that). #BookSky
Unfortunately, this book is all too relevant in our current political moment. Help spread the word.
nyupress.org/978147983829...
Obviously some time left, but incredibly underwhelming.
Virginia proposes a law to teach facts in schools
By building their voice assistant around generative AI, Amazon has created an Alexa that simply doesn’t work.
Easy tasks, like playing music or pulling up YouTube videos, go haywire.
It’s an AI flop.
www.wired.com/story/why-is...
Algorithmic targeting systems are the perfect tools to obliterate rules of engagement, as humans who are considered bottlenecks to decision making,"rubber stamp" machine decisions after seconds of deliberation, & acceptable level of collateral damage is increased to reflect expanded ability to kill.
“Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill that prohibits schools from teaching that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was peaceful or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the 1st Democratic state to try to shape how such events are taught” www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
This from 2024 is essential reporting about AI, target generation, and tempo, deadly deadly deadly tempo.
www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-...
"Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."
Picture of a panel in a conference center. There is a dias with a black curtain at the front, and a gray podium. Behind the dias sits Carmen Maria Machado, a fair-skinned femme wearing glasses with dark hair, Umair Kazi, a brown masc with dark hair, Alex Hanna, a brown butch trans woman with short brown hair, and Vauhini Vara, a brown woman with long black hair wearing a red blouse.
There were 250 people in the audience, at the biggest available room for our #awp26 panel, Resisting AI in Writing and Teaching.
It was invigorating; hearing about how writing instructors are pushing back against their institutions was inspiring. Thanks to my co-panelists Carmen and Umair.
