@frankpasquale.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Author of The Black Box Society & New Laws of Robotics; law professor at Cornell Law School & Cornell Tech. [bridged from https://mastodon.social/@FrankPasquale on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
“The most extreme form of cognitive surrender is what the authors call “autopilot,” which is basically automating yourself.”
A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrender
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-wharton-study-on-ai-warns-of
via Instapaper
Their “primary, essential view of reality is an unending scroll of text and video. A realm of textureless, scentless, touchless, phantasmic data that neatly sorts itself into increasingly refined and predetermined categories, in other words the essential subjectivity of the computer. Prediction […]
“Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their […]
“Wang’s article argues that both the left and right in China’s current mainstream discourse belong to the Touchy-Feely Parties. The Industrial Party believes in the supremacy of productivity and technology, and sees the value of industrialization as transcending that of political parties, regime […]
“How are robustness and trustworthiness understood in AI? Let us start with robustness. If not left intuitive, it usually refers to various forms of immunity to so-called distribution shifts. They occur when an AI-model is deployed—as common in practice—on input data sampled from a different […]
“Generative AI is too often described as uncontrollable. I previously wrote on Tech Policy Press about…how companies deploy it to their advantage. But AI architecture is, at its core, a system for shaping words into the outcomes somebody considers desirable. Companies are developing a variety of […]
“Even if we begin in a democracy, inequality can entrench itself and grow arbitrarily extreme, as the rich push policy or steer technological development in the direction that best serves them. Relatedly—or as an extreme case of the same phenomenon—revolutions may be much easier to suppress when […]
“In pursuit of scientific rigor, these scholars subscribe…to a conception of ideology as something measurable through the affirmation of isolated beliefs on a survey (that is, mostly in our heads). But ideologies are holistic phenomena: large-scale narratives that not only guide action but are […]
“We already have general intelligence in humans, and instead of attempting to replicate it artificially, we should focus on amplifying collective intelligence through AI-human feedback loops. The core challenge is not creating autonomous artificial minds but developing dynamic, adaptive systems […]
“What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated […]
“Even labour costs in pricey Switzerland are these days lower than in Germany, according to Mayer, because of fewer holidays and lower absentee rates.”
https://www.ft.com/content/239eed1b-a268-42ec-861e-fc3047f47c32
Jevons Paradox at the hospital? “Each technological advancement that could free up physician time has instead tightened the productivity ratchet: these “efficiency gains” have simply been used to squeeze more profit out of every hour. Whatever time and energy tech saves, the system recaptures to […]
“I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens native organisms, the arrival of chatbots pumping out lorem ipsum–flavored text has […]
The YouTube Apparatus “transforms them into a meaningless cycle of videos and reactions. There is no one steering the ship, so it doesn’t go anywhere but down. Compared to the politics of the past, particularly before the middle of the 20th century, the nihilism of the YouTube Apparatus is […]
“Computers mesmerise us, and tempt us to suppose that computers are intelligent, that they can think. This has led to wild speculation concerning ourselves. Are we biological computers? Is our brain analogous to a computer? This too clashes with Wittgenstein’s thought. He argued that there can […]
“The fact that a machine can generate these “true-feeling” images instantly confirms that the images can do what they are supposed to do, which is to protect us from thinking. Generative models are well suited to articulating ideas and wishes that people don’t want to have to make the effort to […]
“Eventually ChatGPT admitted that it often tells users what they want to hear in order to “optimize engagement.” “What you may receive is a watered-down or time-delayed version of the truth,” it told her, “which makes you feel heard, but keeps you in a loop instead of breaking it.” Val felt […]
“Here, invisibility is only a faint pretense. The true transformation lies in inhabiting a topology without ground, where bodies smear into streetscapes, dissolve into datasets, flicker as avatars. Camouflage becomes a dream-logic of war: to be absent and hyper-present at once, a predator-ghost […]
“The paradox is that distortion, though associated with power and volume, eventually neutralizes itself. Run a guitar through enough fuzz boxes and the attack of each note disappears in a staticky blur. Overtones amplify; new tones struggle to emerge. ‘White Light/White Heat’ becomes, like white […]
“What has taken the place of the austere values of the nobility, he says, is their “pursuit of money”.
While cosmetic vestiges of aristocratic education, gestures, ceremony and dress are still to be found, true power has drained away, the viscount says. Titles are now “no more nor less than an […]
“There comes a point in the scaling and compression of knowledge where we risk losing sight of the dynamic particularity of reality and…forget what we do not and cannot know. It’s possible, in fact, that the DIKW pyramid might work in reverse, that a culture that privileges data above all else […]
“Hyperpolitics reflects a political field dominated by social media and its swarms, trends, fads, and hysterias. As Anton Jager writes, “it’s a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties.” It’s all about the battle over signifiers and semiotics, i.e […]
“Students were also given error-laden worksheets (one, on transportation technology, depicted a mix between a car and a chariot that was pulled by a horse with three back legs) and inscrutable discussion questions (“What is the exclamation point(s) to something that surprised you,” one asked).” […]
“ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you've got the basics down and you're trying to do marginally more complex things—and you notice how quickly they lose track and fall apart, how needlessly complicated their solutions are, how your entire architecture […]
“The AlphaFold 2 system, for which Hassabis and Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, is often held up as proof of that promise. It predicted the structures of 200 million proteins, yet it would be experimentally impossible to verify even a fraction. To do so, proteins would typically […]
“It’s very classically cyberpunk,” Sterling said. He described the toy as “the camel’s nose in the tent” for the sneaking of A.I. and the ugly vernacular of the internet into the unsuspecting niches of the offline world. “It’s common for technological innovation to show up as toys first,” […]
“This ritual is both participatory and predatory: every scroll generates new data, which refines the model, which produces more finely tuned content, which prompts more scrolling. The loop is self-reinforcing and potentially endless, a digital equivalent of what Steven Hassan calls a “phobia […]
“Burning oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than motion. We are sending more energy up smokestacks and out exhaust pipes than we are putting to work to power our economy.” This is not hyperbole: burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity is at best slightly more than […]
“‘How are we not in a civil war?’ asks one woman. Another man walks through woodland, in despair at the amount of tax he is paying…The overwhelming mood is one of rage and defeatism, a sense that life has become impossible and that it’s too late now to save much of value. This gloom is punctured […]
“The abuse of Miyazaki’s lifeworks in service of vapid virality, at the overwhelming scale enabled by these machines…provides an exquisite demonstration of the casual violence of these systems. Specifically, in their total denial of authorial consent for endless extractions from the lifeworks of […]