It's truly a wonder where these topics will take you.
As in with Eliza where we interpret there as being humanity behind it? Or that ultimately "humans demanding we leave stuff to humans because those things are human" is ok?
Balaji Srinivasan Launches “The Network School” in Singapore
In a bold move that seeks to redefine modern education, Balaji Srinivasan, a former partner at a16z and a prominent figure in the tech and cryptocurrency world,...
The benefits of crypto are self evident, thus it is necessary to build an elaborate faux education system to demonstrate them.
I'm sure there will also be some Network Fascism in there for good measure.
To be fair the more imaginative ones have entire educational models built around teaching the societally transformative power of bitcoin.
Promptfondler sounds like an Aphex Twin song title.
the truth in the joke is that you're a huge nerd
Oh absolutely. Yes I think partly my fascination with all of this is that I think I could quite easily have gone the tech bro hype train route. I'm naturally very good with getting into the weeds of tech and understanding how it works. I love systems (love factory, strategy and logistics games) love learning techy skills purely to see how it works etc. I taught myself to code just because the primary software for a particularly for of qualitative analysis annoyed me. I feel I am prime candidate for this whole world.
But at the same time I really dislike the impoverished viewpoint that comes with being only in that space. There's just some things that don't fit that mode of thought. I also don't have ultimate faith in science and tech, probably because the social sciences captured me at an early age, but also because I have an annoying habit of never being comfortable with what I think, so I'm constantly reflecting and rethinking, which I don't think gels well with the tech bro hype train. That's why I embrace the moniker of "Luddite with an IDE". Captures most of it!
AI Kids: Just Say No - AI classrooms speak to a larger question of why we're willing to replace human practice with AI in the first place
AI classrooms speak to a larger question of why we're willing to replace human practice with AI, and why.
Revered friends. I wrote a thing. Mainly because I had a stack of stuff on Joseph Weizenbaum on tap and the AI classroom thing was stuck in my head. I don't know if it's good, but it's certainly written.
The learning facilitators they mention are the key to understanding all of this. They need them to actually maintain discipline and ensure the kids engage with the AI, so they need humans in the room still. But now roles that were once teachers have been redefined as "Learning facilitators". Apparently former teachers have rejoined the school in these new roles.
Like a lot of automation, the main selling point is deskilling roles, reducing pay, making people more easily replaceable (don't need a teaching qualification to be a "learning facilitator to the AI) and producing a worse service which is just good enough if it is wrapped in difficult to verify claims and assumptions about what education actually is. Of course it also means that you get a new middleman parasite siphoning off funds that used to flow to staff.
A private school in London is opening the UK's first classroom taught by artificial intelligence instead of human teachers. They say the technology allows for precise, bespoke learning while critics argue AI teaching will lead to a "soulless, bleak future".
As a silver lining, I imagine all of us in education will retain out jobs and just be unburdened of marking. Thus automation will bring us more freedom and time to develop thoughtful and engaging educational experiences.
Just as automation has always done. Right? RIGHT?!
I remember one time in a research project I switched out the tokeniser to see what impact it might have on my output. Spent about a day re-running and the difference was minimal. I imagine it's wholly the same thing.
*Disclaimer: I don't actually imagine it is wholly the same thing.
The only viable use case, in my opinion, is to utilise its strong abilities in SolidGoldMagicarp to actualise our goals in the SolidGoldMagicarp sector and achieve increased margins on SolidGoldMagicarp.
I absolutely see it - solid stuff. There's a good chance they're a direct influence on Lawrence. In interviews they are constantly referencing artists way before their time like Stevie Wonder and Janis Joplin.
If they can somehow shoehorn in Blair's favourite ID card scheme into it they might win some sort of internal Labour bingo game.
Does this mean they're not going to bother training a whole new model again? I was looking forward to seeing AI Mad Cow Disease after it consumed an Internet's worth of AI generated content.
I really should have done a full risk assessment before invoking the dust specks mind virus, my apologies.
Thanks for the kind feedback, I'm glad that my thoughts resonated with people. Sometimes I start these things and wonder if I've just analysed my way into a weird construct of my own creation.
My hyper fixation for the last 4 years has been the band Lawrence. Eight-piece Soul Funk group with a brass section and two lead vocalists.
The musicianship is incredible. Saw them live last month and you could tell there was no click track as the band members improvised off each other and the crowd. They were having a genuinely good time on stage messing around and the energy was infectious. Genuinely the most fun I've had in years.
Also co-vocalist Gracie's voice! I've heard their albums so many times and there's still moments I find myself muttering blasphemy as she fucking belts it out.
As I get older my music tastes have definitely broadened from my relatively narrow range of Seattle Grunge and metal. Still with this band, my partner doesn't quite know what's happened to me.
Anyway, I recommend this live recording of Hip Replacement from last month.
My most charitable interpretation of this is that he, like a lot of people, doesn't understand AI in the slightest. He treated it like Google, asked for some of the most negative quotes from movie critics for past Coppola films and the AI hallucinated some for him.
If true it's a great example of why AI is actually worse for information retrieval than a basic vector based search engine.
The Politics of Urbit
With Yarvin renewing interest in Urbit I was reminded of this paper that focuses on Urbit as a representation of the politics of "exit". It's free/open access if anyone is interested.
From the abstract...
>This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’...While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual."
Who could have predicted that a first principles ground up new Internet protocol based on monarchism would be a difficult sell.
*I mean, I think that's what Urbit is. I've read multiple pieces describing it and I'm still not really clear.
Forgot to say: yes AI generated slop is one key example, but often I'm also thinking of other tasks that are often presumed to be basic because humans can be trained to perform them with barely any conscious effort. Things like self-driving vehicles, production line work, call center work etc. Like the fact that full self drive requires supervision, often what happens with tech automation is that they create things that de-skill the role or perhaps speed it up, but still require humans in the middle to do things that are simple for us, but difficult to replicate computationally. Humans become the glue, slotted into all the points of friction and technical inadequacy, to keep the whole process running smoothly.
Unfortunately this usually leads to downward pressure on the wages of the humans and the expectation that they match the theoretical speed of the automation rather than recognise that the human is the the actual pace setter because without them the pace would be 0.
Based on my avid following of the Trashfuture podcast, I can authoritatively say that the "Hoon" programming language relies primarily on Australians doing sick burns and popping tyres in their Holden Commodores.
Devs and the Culture of Tech - Final part
Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I've refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I'd post to say the very final installment is done.
I got a bit weird with it this time as I felt like I had an infinite amount to say, all of which only barely got to the underlying point i was trying to make. So much that I wrote I also cut, it's ridiculous.
Anyway now the series is done I'm going to move on to smaller discrete pieces as I work on my book about Tech Culture's propensity to far-right politics. I'll be dropping interesting stuff I find, examples of Right Libertarians saying ridiculous things, so follow along if that's your jam.
Generative AI is a climate disaster
A left-wing podcast for better technology and a better world.
The cost of simply retrieving an answer from the Web is infinitely smaller than the cost of generating a new one.
Great interview with Sasha Luccioni from Huggingface on all the ways that using generative AI for everything is both a) hugely costly compared to existing methods, and b) insane.
The Nation: Silicon Valley is fully MAGA-Pilled
The tech industry is falling over itself to embrace Trump and J.D. Vance. It’s a mask-off moment.
Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the "Tech Right" as they're being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there's more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.
Devs and the Culture of Tech
A newsletter in which I think too much about tech culture elites, the ideologies they cling to and their gleeful aspirations to create the most tediously horrific dystopias. Click to read Unserious Academic, by James Allen-Robertson, a Substack publication. Launched 15 days ago.
Hello all,
TLDR: I've written some stuff about tech ideology via the TV show Devs. It's all free, no paid subs etc. Would love it if anyone interested wanted to take a look - link is to my blog.
Longer blurb: Firstly if this is severely poor form please tell me to do one, throw tomatoes etc.
I'm a Sociologist that focuses on tech culture. Particularly elite tech culture and the far right. I started off writing about the piracy cultures of the 2000s and their role in the switch to digital distribution back in 2013. Just by virtue of paying attention to tech ideology I've now ended up also researching far right extremism and radicalisation and do a lot of data analysis with antifacist orgs. I also used to flirt around in the Sneerclub post-rat spaces on reddit and twitter a few years back too.
Anyway, I've been researching NRx and the wider fashy nature of tech since 2016 but because of "issues" I've not yet got much out into the world. I'm working on a book that more closely examines the way that the history and ideologies in tech culture play well to far right extremism and what it might say about the process of radicalisation more generally.
However, because I'm tired of glacial academic publishing timelines I've also started a research blog called Unserious Academic and for my first project I use the Alex Garland TV show Devs to illustrate and explore some of the things I know about tech culture. I've put out three parts so far with a fourth one ready for Monday. I'm not looking for paid subs or anything, all free I just figured some people might be interested.
I also desperately need a place where people know what a neoreactionary is so I can more easily complain about them so I'd like to hang around longer term too. Thanks for your time!