Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” —Carl Sagan, via @LucLalande

@suitpossum — “The conflict is not ‘AI vs. Humans’. The conflict is ‘Humans who control AI infrastructures vs. Humans who don’t”

@MazzucatoM — “David Ricardo was in 1821 talking about effect of mechanization on jobs and wages. But as long as profits were reinvested in economy, new jobs appeared. That stopped with maximisation of shareholder value. Blame financialization & bad governance, not robots! “

@gideonro — “Without changes, we will eventually have algorithms to keep us perfectly perched just at the edge of financial ruin, but not over it.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@haymarketbooks — “No human being is illegal.”

Prof. Jason Stanley — Three Essential Facets of Fascism

1. Conjuring a “mythic past” that has supposedly been destroyed (“by liberals, feminists, and immigrants”)
2. Fascist leaders sow division; they succeed by “turning groups against each other,” inflaming historical antagonisms and ancient hatreds for their own advantage.
3. Fascists “attack the truth” with propaganda, in particular “a kind of anti-intellectualism” that “creates a petri dish for conspiracy theories.”

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Every fortnight (or so) I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@white_owly — “If you’re looking for obscene wealth it can usually be found right beside obscene poverty.”

The Most Important Survival Skill for the Next 50 Years Isn’t What You Think — via @titiabruning

“Basically: technological innovation and artificial intelligence are going to accelerate at a pace we’ve yet to really comprehend. (Fifteen years ago, Facebook wasn’t even around. Now it’s so efficient at micro-targeting that it helped sway a democratic election. Imagine what it might be capable of in another fifteen years.) That means automation will likely disrupt your current job (and your next one, and the one after that), and you’ll be the target of attention-grabbing, behavior-modifying algorithms so exponentially effective you won’t even realize you’re being targeted.

The best defense against that? An emotional flexibility that allows for constant reinvention, and knowing yourself well enough that you don’t get drawn into the deep Internet traps set for you.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I should have followed Ni Kuang’s process for doing work. Get paid first, deliver on time but absolutely no rewrites. That’s your business. Genius.” —@ActivateLearn

“Freelancing is a tightrope act of sharing and protecting your wares.” —@White_Owly

“The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition. Nature is miraculous enough.” —Christopher Hitchens via @Hitch_Slapping

“Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so. Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment! If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it’s wrong!” —Richard Feynman via @ProfFeynmam

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds

“I’m convinced that people think freelancers have their lives funded by some kind of freelancing fairy, and that invoices are therefore an exercise in comedy.” —WhiteOwl

“AI makes us more powerful. It doesn’t make us wiser.” —@joi

“The impact of technology on our lives — and on the future of meaningful work — is the result of research, investment, regulatory, and business model choices that are made by people.” —Byrone Auguste

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” —Søren Kierkegaard, via @EskoKilpi

Howard Rheingold: What Technophiles Need To Know: Part One

“Although our present crisis is so threatening precisely because it plays out on the physical plane, where our bodies and other creatures live, it is a crisis of knowledge. We lack a crucial mental skill. I contend that our position today regarding the way we make decisions about technologies is similar to the dilemma that pre-Enlightenment scientists faced in the sixteenth century. We simply don’t have a good method for thinking and making decisions about how to apply (and not apply) the powerful tools of rationality, the scientific method, reductionism, the combination of logic and efficiency embodied by technology.”

Roger Schank: To know AI is to understand it

All the talk about AI these days relates in no way to self refection, to knowing what you need to know, or to anticipating the future. We talk about “AI” but we are not talking about the “I”. We have intelligent entities already. (They are called humans.) When they are confused they ask for explanations. When today’s so-called “AI’s” start doing that, please let me know. In the meantime, it would be nice if there weren’t an article a day in major publications about AI when what they mean is number crunching and pattern matching, not wondering and trying to find out.

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The journey to knowledge is as important as the moment of realization, learning design has collapsed the journey into the moment, lessening the experience by depriving us of the collateral learning along the way.” —@RalphMercer

A Thousand Rivers

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World. … when you push a child to do something she simply developmentally can not do, you create a profound belief that (a) I hate this; (b) I can’t do this; (c) I will never be able to do this, and (d) There’s something wrong with me … Talk to gifted scientists, writers, artists, entrepreneurs. You will find they learned like a Yanomami child learns, through keen observation, experimentation, immersion, freedom, participation, through real play and real work, through the kind of free activity where the distinction between work and play disappears. Talk to a really good auto mechanic, carpenter, farmer, fiddle player, web designer, film editor, songwriter, photographer, chef, and you will find they learned the same way.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@ProfFeynman: “FEYNMAN learning strategy in THREE points:
1. Continually ask “Why?”
2. When you learn something, learn it to where you can explain it to a child.
3. Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious.”

“Learning is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories.” —Eric Kandel (2000 Nobel Laureate), via @charlesjennings

“It is certain in any case that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin, via @UNESCO

@AralBalkan: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.” – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “I wonder if @jk_rowling realised while writing this that it is the perfect warning about Silicon Valley, ‘the cloud’ and surveillance capitalism.”

@ChaosPrime: “remember, kids, if you absolutely bust your ass integrating yourself psychologically so you’re aware of what you’re doing and why and can actually act ethically, you then get to enjoy getting outcompeted by everybody whose neocortex is tasked solely with post hoc justification”

@white_owly: “Cognitive diversity makes for awkward conversation when you first meet. You’re essentially speaking different languages. Food for thought when designing a recruitment process.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse & armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile … it has become the carapace, the protective & aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.” —Marshall McLuhan, via @grescoe

“Computers are rubbish. They only give answers” —Picasso, via @alansmlxl

@mmay3r: “The internet doesn’t fracture truth, it reveals the many competing truths that always existed but were flattened by centralized broadcast technology.”

@cennydd: “I’m trying to avoid the term ‘AI’. It mythologises tech as a new species, a self-directed moral agent outside our control. But, of course, these technologies are absolutely within our control. They’re products of our code, decisions, and policies. Their ethics are our ethics.”

@SimonDeDeo: “Machine learning is an amazing accomplishment of engineering. But it’s not science. Not even close. It’s just 1990, scaled up. It has given us *literally* no more insight than we had twenty years ago.”

@LuxAlptraum: “Plastic Strawgate became a thing for the same reason we endlessly argue over recycling: it’s easier to fixate on small, personal choices that feel under our control than it is to restructure our society at the systemic level we’d need to truly help the environment.”

@HughCards: “You can have a fantastic product, work your ass off, be loved by the media, and still be poor. Just ask any restauranteur.

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” —George Orwell

“As the preliterate confronts the literate in the postliterate arena, as new information patterns inundate and uproot the old, mental breakdowns of varying degrees–including the collective nervous breakdowns of whole societies unable to resolve their crises of identity–will become very common.” —Marshall McLuhan (1969)

The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt: NYT via @leadershipabc

In her 1951 work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt wrote of refugees: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, but that they no longer belonged to any community whatsoever.” The loss of community has the consequence of expelling a people from humanity itself. Appeals to abstract human rights are meaningless unless there are effective institutions to guarantee these rights. The most fundamental right is the “right to have rights.”

Why Trump’s Baby Jails Strategy Backfired, Unleashing Waves of Empathy by @GeorgeLakoff

“As I’ve written before, the conservative moral system is based on the metaphorical idea of a Strict Father Family. In this metaphor, the strict father figure makes the rules and enforces them. It’s the job of everyone else to do as he says. If they don’t, it’s his job to punish them painfully enough so that they will do as he says in the future. Zero tolerance! Authority is justified. Winners deserve to win; losers deserve to lose. Winners are better than losers.”

Kleptocracy and kakistocracy

“It is also a mistake to think that it is only in countries with weak institutions and immature political systems that thieves and goons can reach the most important positions. What we are seeing today in the United States and in many European countries that have long democratic traditions simply shows that no nation is immune to the rise of a kakistocracy. Internet searches for this word, derived from ancient Greek, have seen a huge boom since Donald Trump got to the White House.

Like all good illusionists, the kleptocrats know how to distract us from looking at their misdeeds and the kakistocrats know how to distract us from their ineptitude. They do it by talking to us about ideology and attacking those of their rivals. While we watch and play our part in these ideological circuses, they steal. Or tinker with government policies they don’t really understand.”

Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan – review

“Although Facebook has become a leviathan, that simply means that it can only be tamed by another leviathan, in this case, the state. Vaidhyanathan argues that the key places to start are privacy, data protection, antitrust and competition law. Facebook is now too big and should be broken up: there’s no reason why it should be allowed to own Instagram and WhatsApp, for example. Regulators should be crawling over the hidden auctions it runs for advertisers. All uses of its services for political campaigns should be inspected by regulators and it should be held editorially responsible for all the content published on its site.”

Reclaiming RSS by @aral

“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … RSS was an essential part of Web 1.0 before surveillance capitalism (Web 2.0) took over.”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” —Father John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, Image by @BryanMMathers