Tech and Society
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Tech and Society
Aside from the doomers who believe that AI will kill us all and the techno-utopians who believe it will solve all of our problems, there are three main ways that people seem to be thinking about AI.
At one extreme, you might fear that AI will take your job. Certainly, you’ve read as much in the press, and it does seem to be getting better and... See more
At one extreme, you might fear that AI will take your job. Certainly, you’ve read as much in the press, and it does seem to be getting better and... See more
Via Packy McCormick
The easiest thing to get to conform is the technology.
The hardest thing to get to conform is your nervous system is the sun is the sky is your life, you know?
So Program or Be Programmed really means understand the technology well enough to use it in a way that's compatible with you and your creative cycle, rather than trying to conform your
... See moreNeil Postman's questions to ask of a new technology:
What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might result from solving this problem?
Which people and institutions might be harmed by this solution?... See more
The current problem, in short, is not a lack of content, nor an inability to sift through it. The problem is finding ways to care about the things we encounter in our digitally mediated environment, or at least alleviating the overwhelming sense of that environment being flooded with garbage.
Parasocial media, however unsophisticated and shallow much of it may be, at least reflects a theory of how we might navigate this digital landscape. It at least attempts, imperfectly, to answer the question: Why should I care about any of this? (Plenty of content thinks it answers this question but doesn’t.)
Returning to the topic of AI, its prospective applications for content creation seem to mostly get this wrong, doubling down on the fallacy embodied in recommendation algorithms: that humans are not the original source of meaning but passive receptacles waiting to be filled with it. The situation I’ve just described will grow increasingly urgent, thrusting the internet into an entropic state, as AI-generated content proliferates without better mechanisms for making it matter—for making us care about what’s being produced. Or maybe most of it will dump straight into digital landfills, unseen, and it won’t even matter that it doesn’t matter.
Increasingly of the belief that most problems are cultural, not technological.
Like Gus Speth said:
“The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy – & to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation”
I wonder if 50 years from now we're going to look back at how we've redesigned our world around computers with the same regret that people look back at how we redesigned cities around cars. 🤔
Ben Reinhardttwitter.com