Great ep of the #TechWontSaveUs #podcast where @parismarx interviews #JathanSadowski about his new book - The Luddite and the Mechanic.
Great framing of the Mechanic *doing* things and the Luddite understanding *why* those things were built and who they serve.
https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/259_how_to_see_tech_like_a_luddite_w_jathan_sadowski
The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for #HumanIntelligenceTasks").
This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "#AbsentIndians." Or, to use #JathanSadowski's wonderful term: #PotemkinAI:
https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/
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Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.
There's a great name for an AI that's trained on an AI's output, courtesy of #JathanSadowski: #HabsburgAI.
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The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other confident habitual liar chatbots, which are extruding plausible sentences at vast scale. Future confident habitual liar chatbots will be trained on the output of these confident liar chatbots, producing #JathanSadowski's #HabsburgAI:
https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194
But the declining quality of Google Search isn't merely a function of chatbot overload. For many years, Google's local business listings have been *terrible*.
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I coined a term on @machinekillspod that I feel like needs its own essay: Habsburg AI – a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI's that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features. It joins the lineage of Potemkin AI.
The #AdaLovelaceInstitute's giant "Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power" report is a *banger* on this subject, covering interoperability, privacy, equity, information security and more, with superb contributions from @1br0wn and #JathanSadowski:
https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/rethinking-data/
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Speaking of Chiang's essay in this week's episode of #ThisMachineKills, #JathanSadowski expertly punctures the #ChatGPT4 hype bubble, which holds that the *next* version of the chatbot will be so amazing that any critiques of the current technology will be rendered obsolete:
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Jumping off an FT op-ed on venture capital and tech hype – which aligns great with TMK thought – we discuss the value and risk models of venture capitalism, then get into the emerging market structure
Kathy Reid
pdb
Cory Doctorow
