A crisis of social reproduction

“We are living in a world that is the most cognitively demanding world that there has ever been...So it is unsurprising that people feel that they are overwhelmed. They can’t focus. They can’t concentrate because that is the world we live in.”
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-21/women-adhd-medication-overtake-men-australia-data-four-corners/106583242
#zeitgeist #CareWork #CrisisOfCare #women #gender #ReproductiveLabour #DoubleBurden #CareDeficit #austerity #overwhelmedness #speed #ClimateCrisis #lifeworld #pharmaceuticals #medication #SocialTransition

Film:
A retired woman moves into an apartment building in Reykjavík, Iceland and domesticates the neighbours. In her #neighbourhood she takes on
#SUV lovers,
#fossilfuel machine 'gardening’,
indoor doof doof parties,
roaming #pets,
teen pregnancy,
screen-warehousing children,
domestic #violence,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
addiction and much more.

TRAILER >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89tiHi4wM8Q

The Danish Woman (2025) premieres Thursday 19 February at SBS On Demand.>>
https://www.sbs.com.au/whats-on/article/top-new-tv-series-to-watch-this-february/ai32i2zoq
#film #women #care #lifeworld #EverydayLived #experience #climate #pollution

What I mean when I talk about ‘LLMs in the lifeworld’

It’s a conceptual vocabulary I’ve slipped into which tends to make Archerian realists cringe slightly, but it’s essentially what Mark Coeckelbergh is talking about here in his book Self Improvement:

Using terms from Wittgenstein, I have argued that technology is embedded in games and in a form of life. When we use technologies, this is part of our activities and of the ways we do things in our society and culture. For example, when I use AI to do a search, this search is related to my activities (research, playing music, cooking, etc.) and the ways these activities are done in our society and culture: the rules, games, habits, norms, values, and so forth that are related to the activity. AI feeds on these, indirectly via data, and our interpretations of the results are embedded in those games and form of life. Similarly, humanist activities relied on a range of technologies and media—books, letters, the printing press—that were a crucial part in processes of making knowledge and interpreting, and that made sense only within a particular form of life.

#lifeworld #LLMs #MarkCoeckelbergh #realism #technology

LLMs are now in the lifeworld

This episode of Hardfork astutely captures something I’ve been trying to articulate for ages. If you see LLMs in terms of the hype cycles, capital investment and the bullshit pathway to AGI, you risk losing sight of the ever expanding range of utterly mundane ways in which LLMs are now in the lifeworld:

I think about it as a journal that talks back to you. Which is like kind of what being coached in anything feels like that. You think about your learning an athletic skill …. you have a coach who is standing there with you and says “hey go try this thing” and you do it and you come back and the coach says “next time do it this way”. That is essentially what the AI is doing. Because it is this general purpose technology it can coach you pretty well in a lot of things. One of the things I like about this is it gets around a common and true criticism of these chatbots which is they make a lot of mistakes, they hallucinate. All of that is true. But if you just want to become a novice at meditating, it can handle that. Actually it’s really good at it.

So I think it’s important to find those chatbot use cases where it’s not mission critical, no one’s life or career is at stake, but it can provide you this meaningful help. That actually is the truest story of AI that is unfolding right now. This expanding set of positive and helpful and increasingly more powerful things. If you’re not encountering that, I do think you’re missing out a big part of what’s missing in Silicon Valley now.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/33nZxLb2JUuY0vrUa61SXe?si=mn3sNAogRAuJerOTCzmRKw

There are simply more people having mundane relations with the technology in their lifeworld, often in specialised and specific ways which don’t show up in the broadest categories of use.

#AI #coaching #Hardfork #lifeworld

I just encountered this notion via Tusting et al’s Academics Writing and it immediately helped me clarify the sense in which Claude now shows up in my professional lifeworld:

Professional writing practices may be acquired and sustained as much through engaging with “sponsors of literacy”, as through formal training or education. Brandt develops this idea, defining sponsors of literacy as: any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, supress or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way. (Brandt, 1998, p. 166) In a higher education context, literacy sponsors include colleagues and mentors who support academics’ writing efforts, as well as publishers, reviewers, and editors who act as gatekeepers.

In contrast I don’t believe copilots could ever be sponsors of literacy. My concern is that panicked commercialisation strategies will lead to conversational agents being fine-tuned to resemblance copilots. Even if I took to them pretty organically for fairly idiosyncratic reasons (intellectual curiosity, being a long-term blogger, being a generalist, intellectual scaffolding about technological reflexivity etc) I’m realising their weird and open-ended character makes them hard to use.

I think Ethan Mollick’s rule of thumb that you need to use a frontier model for at least 10 hours to get any real sense of what it can do is broadly correct. It takes much longer than that to integrate it into your practice. I’m worried that conversational agents in their current form will be engineered out of existence because they’re not a commercially viable product.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/06/conversational-agents-can-be-sponsors-of-literacy/

#claude #conversationalAgents #generativeAI #lifeworld #sponsorsOfLiteracy

This passage from Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960 (pg 213-214) captures something I’ve thought about a lot in relation to the reception of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity, particularly how its sensitivity to the utterly quotidian tends to be missed by many sociological critics:

When Murdoch’s book on Sartre was published, a barber line of hers comparing Sartre’s world to Ryle’s became justly famous. The Concepts of Mind, she said, evoked a picture of a world ‘in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist party’. At the time, it seemed like a comparison much to Ryle’s disfavour; but the statement is in fact distinctly ambivalent. If something was missing from Ryle’s world, perhaps something was missing from Sartre’s, too. What sort of life would it be where we lurched from a meeting of the Free French to a secret transaction with a backstreet abortionist to violent sex in a seedy hotel but never baked a cake, looked back to a childhood birthday party or went to the circus?

(Incidentally, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how clearly Charles Taylor has stated the influence of Iris Murdoch on his thought, yet how rarely that figures in narratives of either of them)

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/07/our-conception-of-the-lifeworld-needs-the-mundane-as-much-as-it-needs-the-dramatic/

#charlesTaylor #everydayLife #IrisMurdoch #lifeworld #margaretArcher #reflexivity #sartre

I thought this was spot on from Ethan Mollick about the conditions which will enable conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT to show up in everyday experience. If you leave aside the (huge) question mark over how GPT-4o could possibly be commercially viable, it suggests a near future in which quasi-agents which become a routine part of organisational interactions:

With GPT-4o, OpenAI again cements its lead (and least for tonight) over the AI space, but it also is a clear sign of an important shift I have been writing about for a while. All of these features we are starting to see appear — lower prices, higher speeds, multimodal capability, voice, large context windows, agentic behavior — are about making AI more present and more naturally connected to human systems and processes. If an AI that seems to reason like a human being can see and interact and plan like a human being, then it can have influence in the human world. This is where AI labs are leading us: to a near future of AI as coworker, friend, and ubiquitous presence. I don’t think anyone, including OpenAI, has a full sense of all of the implications of this shift, and what it will mean for all of us.

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-openai-did

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/14/ubiquity-and-multimodality-is-what-will-enable-gai-to-show-up-in-everyones-lifeworld/

#conversationalAgents #ethanMollick #lifeworld #work