This is a fascinating list Rob - thanks for sharing. I guess my instinct comes down on AI as a normal technology but I am going to some deeper reading. A few names on this list I am not familiar with. Not sure how reviving management cybernetics fits here. I think this is an interesting model but not especially linked to how AI plays out.
Hey Kenny, Glad you find it interesting. AI as a normal technology and AI as a cultural technology are both fairly intuitive, but also passive, frames of understanding. You are right to see cybernetics as a tougher fit. It is hard to talk about Beer and others in this vein without getting theoretical, but you can start with the insight that the theory itself is about taking action to understand something.
Passive frames don’t get you very far when it comes to understanding something new. You have to play with a new toy or new technology to understand it. Cybernetics, at least the version I find interesting, is a way to think about how organizations can play with large AI models to accomplish practical things, hopefully better things that benefit people and society.
Thanks for this: I have a bit of form here myself, having been making films about this stuff for 30+ years: in 1992 'The Electronic Frontier' for the BBC/Nova asked 'What would the world look like with information as money?' and foresaw the computer in your pocket (13 years before the iPhone), the death of Main St, ubiquitous surveillance via smart devices and DeepFakes, including their political risks. Then 'Truth Decay' in 2020 on the death of reality, etc. So I'd like to add a couple of names to this list: Ed Zitron, always splenetic but fantastically detailed forensics of the truth behind the hype https://www.wheresyoured.at/, and Casey Mock, who has been on all sides of this fight and sees the big picture https://www.tomorrowsmess.com/. Obviously also Margaret Mitchell, Emily Bender and all the other women thrown out of tech jobs for daring to question its priorities. Many many others but this is a start, perhaps. Thanks, as ever, for these posts
One of the great pleasures of Substack is having writers and artists I admire appear as subscribers and commenters. I ran across Complexity at some point last year, and quite like it as an introduction to an important set of questions. If I ever teach a class on complex adaptive systems, it might end up on my syllabus.
I agree Zitron and Bender are fantastic writers. Gebru and Hanna, too. Their work seems more focused on skepticism of AI and its purveyors, which is crucial, given the volume of well-funded hype. Having spent time thinking skeptically about AI (and not sure I have much to contribute), I'm searching for frames of understanding (frames of acceptance in Kenneth Burke's vocabulary) that are more open to what, if any, social value generative AI may offer. Such alternatives may offer value....at least that's the idea.
Mock is new to me, so, with your recommendation, in my queue. Aside from confusing her with Melanie Mitchell, I don't know Margaret Mitchell well, so I will correct that. Thanks for taking a moment to educate me!
Thanks for this, and you are welcome to use Complexity, as long as you let me know! Margaret/Meg Mitchell was terminated/sunsetted from Google for being too human, and is now - I think - at Hugging Face, calling - loudly but evidently not loudly enough - for more transparency over the energy and water budgets of LLMS - my current preoccupation.
As for social value, in general if there's a job (distilling, summarising, reading annual reports)that's too dull for a human to enjoy, it should probably be done by a bot, leaving the human free to spend her human capital in enjoyable, creative and loving ways. So, given the metastasing of bullshit jobs, it definitely has social value there, I'd say.
This is a fascinating list Rob - thanks for sharing. I guess my instinct comes down on AI as a normal technology but I am going to some deeper reading. A few names on this list I am not familiar with. Not sure how reviving management cybernetics fits here. I think this is an interesting model but not especially linked to how AI plays out.
Hey Kenny, Glad you find it interesting. AI as a normal technology and AI as a cultural technology are both fairly intuitive, but also passive, frames of understanding. You are right to see cybernetics as a tougher fit. It is hard to talk about Beer and others in this vein without getting theoretical, but you can start with the insight that the theory itself is about taking action to understand something.
Passive frames don’t get you very far when it comes to understanding something new. You have to play with a new toy or new technology to understand it. Cybernetics, at least the version I find interesting, is a way to think about how organizations can play with large AI models to accomplish practical things, hopefully better things that benefit people and society.
Thanks for putting this together!
Thanks for this: I have a bit of form here myself, having been making films about this stuff for 30+ years: in 1992 'The Electronic Frontier' for the BBC/Nova asked 'What would the world look like with information as money?' and foresaw the computer in your pocket (13 years before the iPhone), the death of Main St, ubiquitous surveillance via smart devices and DeepFakes, including their political risks. Then 'Truth Decay' in 2020 on the death of reality, etc. So I'd like to add a couple of names to this list: Ed Zitron, always splenetic but fantastically detailed forensics of the truth behind the hype https://www.wheresyoured.at/, and Casey Mock, who has been on all sides of this fight and sees the big picture https://www.tomorrowsmess.com/. Obviously also Margaret Mitchell, Emily Bender and all the other women thrown out of tech jobs for daring to question its priorities. Many many others but this is a start, perhaps. Thanks, as ever, for these posts
One of the great pleasures of Substack is having writers and artists I admire appear as subscribers and commenters. I ran across Complexity at some point last year, and quite like it as an introduction to an important set of questions. If I ever teach a class on complex adaptive systems, it might end up on my syllabus.
I agree Zitron and Bender are fantastic writers. Gebru and Hanna, too. Their work seems more focused on skepticism of AI and its purveyors, which is crucial, given the volume of well-funded hype. Having spent time thinking skeptically about AI (and not sure I have much to contribute), I'm searching for frames of understanding (frames of acceptance in Kenneth Burke's vocabulary) that are more open to what, if any, social value generative AI may offer. Such alternatives may offer value....at least that's the idea.
Mock is new to me, so, with your recommendation, in my queue. Aside from confusing her with Melanie Mitchell, I don't know Margaret Mitchell well, so I will correct that. Thanks for taking a moment to educate me!
Thanks for this, and you are welcome to use Complexity, as long as you let me know! Margaret/Meg Mitchell was terminated/sunsetted from Google for being too human, and is now - I think - at Hugging Face, calling - loudly but evidently not loudly enough - for more transparency over the energy and water budgets of LLMS - my current preoccupation.
Hugging Face is a topic on my never ending list of things to write about. I know Sasha Luccioni's writing, but not Mitchell's. Thanks again!
As for social value, in general if there's a job (distilling, summarising, reading annual reports)that's too dull for a human to enjoy, it should probably be done by a bot, leaving the human free to spend her human capital in enjoyable, creative and loving ways. So, given the metastasing of bullshit jobs, it definitely has social value there, I'd say.