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...