Technology

information & communication technology

new governance capabilities

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This is a follow-up from my post — diversity > learning > trust — where I said that these become the key elements in building better organizational structures that can help us differentiate between stark reality and blatant lies. These elements are how we should connect because it’s in the connections that we can make sense. The lack of diversity, the unwillingness to learn, and the lack of trust are what is dumbing so many people down.

I used the following model to show where we are in terms dominant organizational societal forms — based on Tribes, Institutions, Markets, or Networks — showing that we are currently in a phase-shift between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.

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I write therefore I think

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I think this will become a major problem with embedded GPT & LLM appearing in almost every work productivity tool — “Skipping the writing process short-circuits reflection (‘Writing as Thinking’)” —Stephen P Anderson

While they may help to write summaries and presentations, tools like ChatGPT will likely short-circuit the creative writing process.

“For creative endeavors, I never want to have something else come up with my writing. The holistic labor of creative writing is struggling to succinctly translate your own experiences and ideas from your mental space to the physical realm. My ideas and the ways I express them in text are the most precious things I have, the ones that differentiate me from everyone else. Moreover, in the process of generating the written form of your ideas, you come up with different ways of thinking about them.” —Vicky Boykis 2023

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the button

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Ethan Mollick discusses the impact of ‘The Button’ on our writing. The Button is in Google Docs but similar GPT-LLM tools are or will soon be available in many other writing tools. They can immediately create a credible piece of writing, such as a letter of recommendation or a proposal, increasing anyone’s speed of writing and avoiding writer’s block. These tools are exceptionally convenient, so of course most people will use them. But at what cost?

“But then The Button starts to tempt everyone. Work that was boring to do, but meaningful when completed by humans (like performance reviews) becomes easy to outsource – and the apparent quality actually increases. We start to create documents mostly with AI that get sent to AI-powered inboxes where the recipients respond mostly with AI. Even worse, we still create the reports by hand, but realize that no human is actually reading them. This kind of meaningless task, what organizational theorists have called mere ceremony, has always been with us. But AI will make a lot of previously useful tasks meaningless. It it will also remove the facade that previously disguised meaningless tasks. We may not have always known if our work mattered in the bigger picture, but in most organizations, the people in your part of the organizational structure felt that it did. With AI-generated work sent to other AIs to assess, that sense of meaning disappears.” —Ethan Mollick

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automation vs augmentation

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Understanding machine learning (ML), generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), and large language models (LLM) has become a part-time job for me. Not only is there a lot of information and discussion, but a wide range of opinions. The topic of ‘AI’ constantly pops up in professional meetings. Researcher danah boyd discusses the difference between the perspectives of automation vs. augmentation as ‘AI’ develops.

“When it comes to AI’s potential future impact on jobs, Camp Automation tends to jump to the conclusion that most jobs will be automated away into oblivion … most in Camp Automation tend to panic and refuse to engage with how their views might intersect with late-stage capitalism, structural inequality, xenophobia, and political polarization … Camp Augmentation is more focused on how things will just change. If we take Camp Augmentation’s stance, the next question is: what changes should we interrogate more deeply?” —Zephoria 2023-04-21

I am mostly in the augmentation camp, though I am concerned that automation + capitalism = a perfect storm. This was the case with the augmented work enabled by the personal computer. Knowledge work improved significantly but wages did not.

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“a pandemic of thoughtlessness”

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Christopher Lydon, host of Radio OpenSource, interviews two humanists on failing intelligence.

“Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his ‘keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas’. He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.” —2023-05-04

Highlights

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step lively

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It seems that today everyone is chatting about GPT (generative pre-trained transformers) and what feeds them — large language models (LLM). I am always skeptical when the next techno-hype cycle comes around but this one seems different. The worst case scenario does not look good, especially for knowledge workers.

In a few months, maybe a year, the first wave of AI-driven layoffs slash firings are going to hit the economy. And then? They’ll just keep going. Executives are going to figure out that a whole lot of work — clerical, administrative, accounting, legal, writing, marketing, customer relations, even decision-making and risk analysis and data analysis — can be automated. AI’s going to be like offshoring, but much, much worse. Offshoring wiped out the working class — AI’s going to finish the job of wiping out the middle class. Offshoring eviscerated blue collar jobs — AI’s going to wipe out some pink collar ones, and a whole lot of white collar ones, too. —Umair Haque 2023-04-28

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getting scraped

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The Washington Post looked at what information feeds Google’s chatbots, particularly the C4 Data Set which scraped 15 million English language websites. This is the ‘artificial intelligence’ that feeds the chat bot — stuff that people have written and posted online. All of this is taken without authorization — “The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.”

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chatting about gpt

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These are some highlights from several sources focused on large language models (LLM) and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) — all published in 2023. It might be useful to first read — Nobody knows how many jobs will “be automated” Whatever that even means.

But “AI will increase labor productivity while forcing a small number of people to find new jobs” is not the kind of story that goes viral on social media, while “300 million jobs will be lost” definitely is that kind of story. People love to read about the impending apocalypse, and it’s the media’s responsibility not to indulge that desire … Instead of telling us who will be “automated”, they [A Method to Link Advances in Artificial Intelligence to Occupational Abilities – 2018] tell us who’s more likely to be affected by automation in some way. Obviously we’d like to know whether it’ll be a good way or a bad way. But the truth is that no one knows that yet, and economists do the world a service by refusing to pretend that they do know.

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy

The optimistic view: it [GPT] will prove to be a powerful tool for many workers, improving their capabilities and expertise, while providing a boost to the overall economy. The pessimistic one: companies will simply use it to destroy what once looked like automation-proof jobs, well-paying ones that require creative skills and logical reasoning; a few high-tech companies and tech elites will get even richer, but it will do little for overall economic growth.

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our machines are tools and not our friends

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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman (1855)

For over a decade, social media have helped me explore different aspects of my learning and my profession, much more than I could have on my own or in my community. I often feel more affinity for some of my online connections than for my local neighbours. Living with contradictions can help develop critical thinking. Social media have enabled more of us to live like artists, constantly redefining ourselves and our work. Despite what is happening at Twitter, other options for connecting online are emerging, such as the open covenant ‘fediverse’ and Mastodon.

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