Pluralistic: “Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed (23 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Humanity is waking up to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence, but we don’t yet understand our role. People talk about unexplainable AI when they should be more concerned about the unexplainable humans running the companies that develop the AI. (Hiya, Sam!) People worried about AI taking their jobs and taking control are comp... See more

Professionals should be the ones making the important decisions and steering AI, not letting it run loose hoping for the best.

As Ari Melenciano, a recent guest speaker at RADAR’s Into: Our Centaur Future, has written: “We’re currently unaware of many aspects of our own psyches yet are automating its design through technologies. The better we know ourselves, the better we’re able to design systems, technologies, lenses that intentionally empower our lights vs. blindly perp... See more

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt

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Doing “deep learning” in vast, pooled, individuality-dissolving intelligence collectives is apparently for machines and insects, not us. Even though we’re just coming off a couple of centuries doing exactly that in vast and hyper-specialized industrial economies. What might it mean to lean into that, instead of resisting and retreating?