Technology

information & communication technology

focused on the wrong literacy

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In 2018, while working for the government of Finland, I developed a model of network literacies. Today our Prime Minister says that Canadians need to develop AI literacy and he even has a Minister of AI to implement it.

Let’s look back at network literacies —

They could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn through their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source — such as Generative AI platforms — destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.

Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain open, transparent, and diverse — therefore reflecting many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, is necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot deal with complex issues and networked forces unless we can knowledgeably talk about them. This requires fluency.

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“trust is flickering”

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Knowledge flows at the speed of trust, I wrote in 2022, further stating that when trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow. This happens in organizations. It also happens at a societal level. Networks of trust are what create value at all levels for human society. The onslaught of generative AI and large language models is destroying our trust in much of the information that informs our knowledge.

My last post on organizational knowledge was based on an article that had been written with the help of AI. It was only through my trusted human knowledge network that I found out. Not only did I lose trust in the author but I think I eroded the trust of my readers here. I will have to be more careful if I continue to blog here and I am wondering what the future of my writing will be.

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end of the line

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In 2014 I started the first of the online PKM workshops, based on a model of three activities per week over six weeks to be done as a cohort with a common start and finish date. I would be available to respond to participants and provide support as required, including video calls.

It’s now the end of the line.

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stupid humans

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I have yet to find a use for Generative AI and continue to read about all the problems arising from the major purveyors of these tools.

Drew Wilson provides dozens of examples of AI gone wrong in Drew Wilson was Right: Carney’s AI Push Leads to AI Hallucinations.

Leaving it all to AI and just expecting some magical money saving result that’s better than ever before is a recipe for disaster. It’s burned so many people as shown above and will continue to burn people. This no matter how many times people swear up and down that AI is ‘improving’ and ‘practically perfect’. It’s nowhere near that and requires human intervention.

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“let the discourse rage without you”

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Joan Westenberg covers a lot of ground in the post the discourse is a distributed denial-of-service attack. I will try to summarize and highlight what I found of importance.

A DDOS is an attack on a web server in an attempt to overload it so it can no longer function. The case that Westenberg refers to is one where thousands of internet devices — not necessarily computers — were pointed at the website of security expert Brian Krebs. As a side note, I would recommend Krebs’ Mastodon feed.

Westenberg goes on to show that the online social media space has become a massive distributed denial-of-service — for our collective brains. There is so much information — not all fake news but a lot of false information shared by people — that vies for our attention and we cannot cope with it.

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disorientation and exploration

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“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

Disorientation and exploration are essential for human learning. By using Generative AI (GPT/LLM) are we bypassing these two stages of learning in search of efficiency and robotic productivity?

“John Nosta, founder of the NostaLab think tank, says AI trains humans to think backward by providing answers before they understand.” — link via Archiv.Today

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better than good enough

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In 2012 Ross Dawson observed that “in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity”. Fast forward to the dawn of 2026:

Here’s what AI did. It drove the cost of nearly every signal to zero. Resumes used to cost time and thought. Now they cost a prompt. Cover letters used to reveal how someone thinks. Now they reveal which model they used. But companies did the same thing. They replaced judgment with AI screeners. Now you have two AIs talking to each other. One generating signals. One evaluating them. Neither connected to anything real. —David Arnoux

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learning as rebellion

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Is human learning now an act of rebellion?

Since 2017 I have made the following observation — For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

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continuing to step aside

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I am not ignoring new technologies in the ‘AI’ field, but I believe there is a real need for people to get better at communicating and making sense with other people. Well that is what I wrote early last year in stepping aside. What have I learned since then?

I still have not found any use for generative AI in my own work.

The rush to implement generative AI in the workplace is leading to massive job cuts especially amongst software programmers. The perfect storm of neo-liberalism and automation continues to tear up 20th century social contracts.

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writing by humans, for humans

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Recently I have found it difficult to maintain my writing pace of +20 years. There are 3,700 blog posts published here but few in the last year. The fact that large language models (LLM) have scraped my website and continue to do so has had me feeling less motivated to share my thoughts. But maybe the best act of rebellion against AI slop is to keep writing and not let the silicon valley bastards grind me down.

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