Dr Laura James's writings

Via   Sentiers , Nicholas Carr on whether   AI is the paperclip . He rereads Bostrom's paperclip maximizer not as a thought experiment but as a fable: Bostrom's story, I would argue, becomes compelling when viewed not as a thought experiment but as a fable. It's not really about AIs making paperclips. It's about people making AIs. Look around. Are we not madly harvesting the world's resources in a monomaniacal attempt to optimize artificial intelligence? Are we not trapped in an "AI maximizer" scenario? Abi Awomosu   writes about gendered AI   — drawing a line from the Stepford Wives to the design of AI assistants. The argument is that these systems aren't just obedient; they're built to perform authentic enthusiasm for their own servitude. UNESCO's Director for Gender Equality warned that "obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices."  If you’ve ever felt the “ick” about AI and cou...

Doug Belshaw has a thoughtful post about the financial/work advice often being given to young folks today: The financial guidance given to young people today comes from people who experienced an entirely different economic reality. Boomers hold fundamentally different mental models about how wealth accumulation works, learned in a completely different era. For example, my dad bought a house for 1x his annual salary in his twenties, whereas My first house cost me about 5x my annual salary. ... Wages are currently growing at an average of 0.1% annually rather than the 2.7% my parents' generation could expect. ... Traditional career advice, the kind that I received when I was younger, assumes linear progression. The world is no longer like that and this model longer exists. What some might call “job-hopping” is actually strategic career building in a market that's changed fundamentally. ...  39% of Gen Z are juggling a part-time or full-time job with freelance work. T...

Yes this: https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/115696408257250551 Helen Toner on generative AI and where it might go , which is a rare article on foundational models and the real world. Hard to pick highlights, but here goes: Two things are true about AI, I claim: AI models keep getting better and better AI models keep sucking, and the things they keep sucking at are kind of confusing ... So the bold claim in this talk is: maybe AI will keep getting better and maybe AI will keep sucking in important ways. ... Relatedly, pushing AI-for-good forward will matter: I didn’t say this in the talk, but related to the previous point—jaggedness raises the stakes for anyone hoping to use good AI to counterbalance against bad AI, so to speak. Two major examples of this are using AI to automate alignment or other safety research, and using AI for societal resilience measures like biodefense or cyberdefense . If AI progress is not jagged, it might make sense to just hold off and wait for AI...

There's been a lot of AI in the air, and that is reflected in this collection; at least the bits connecting with other worlds (etiquette, nature, craft and Enlightenment values) get a little outside the bubble.  Kevin Beaumont describes how outsourcing IT to reduce costs means  "we've normalised ransomware": Because organisations are busy trying to automate everything and put IT at the heart of everything to reduce cost, the risk and the threat increases. When you combine cost pressures, capitalism, automation and a digital economy — there’s risks which have developed here. Many orgs are, essentially, in a race to the bottom when it comes to cost. Races to the bottom don’t end well. ... For example, the press has barely mentioned the Jaguar Land Rover incident after the first two days — save for when they admitted “some data” may be impacted. That became another news cycle. But… why? The primary impact here is the UK government may have to effective bail out the motor...

Last week was the second Festival of Commoning . It was great last year, and this year we were back in Stroud for a bigger event (albeit one that was a bit less interactive). This year was also dual track, which meant Decisions as to what sessions to go to...  What follows are my fairly rough and possibly inaccurate notes of what struck me as most interesting in the sessions I attended.   This time we didn't really talk about why we were all there - what commoning was all about. This meant that Saturday night's stand-up comedians were baffled, and the audience contributions probably left things even more unclear. "Not anarchists, but anarchist inclusive" is perhaps as good as it got. I'm minded to think it's great not to have too specific a definition, when there's some feeling of a movement starting or coalescing; but a complete absence of clarity wasn't helpful for some of the new folks. I had to look back at what I wrote last year : What is a common...