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Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

I am a data factory (and so are you) - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8394

data human rights commons platforms

shared by Steve Bosserman on 10 May 18 - No Cached
  • Data is no less a form of common property than oil or soil or copper. We make data together, and we make it meaningful together, but its value is currently captured by the companies that own it. We find ourselves in the position of a colonized country, our resources extracted to fill faraway pockets. Wealth that belongs to the many — wealth that could help feed, educate, house and heal people — is used to enrich the few. The solution is to take up the template of resource nationalism, and nationalize our data reserves.
  • Emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform. Rather than spending a lot of time doing things that Facebook doesn’t find valuable – such as watching viral videos – you can spend a bit less time, but spend it doing things that Facebook does find valuable. In other words, “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics. Shifting to this model not only sidesteps concerns about tech addiction – it also acknowledges certain basic limits to Facebook’s current growth model. There are only so many hours in the day. Facebook can’t keep prioritising total time spent – it has to extract more value from less time.
  • But let’s assume that our vast data collective is secure, well managed, and put to purely democratic ends. The shift of data ownership from the private to the public sector may well succeed in reducing the economic power of Silicon Valley, but what it would also do is reinforce and indeed institutionalize Silicon Valley’s computationalist ideology, with its foundational, Taylorist belief that, at a personal and collective level, humanity can and should be optimized through better programming. The ethos and incentives of constant surveillance would become even more deeply embedded in our lives, as we take on the roles of both the watched and the watcher. Consumer, track thyself! And, even with such a shift in ownership, we’d still confront the fraught issues of design, manipulation, and agency.
Steve Bosserman

About - Catalog - 0 views

catalogdna.com/about

dna data management

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 02 Oct 18
     
    "We are developing next generation technology to store digital information in DNA molecules. Our vision is to fit the information content of entire data centers in the palm of your hand. We have proven our approach to encoding data in DNA and are in the process of scaling up our platform. CATALOG technology will make it economically attractive to use DNA as a medium for long-term archival of data."
Steve Bosserman

How Cheap Labor Drives China's A.I. Ambitions - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ial-intelligence-labeling.html

artificial intelligence china labor data management machine learning

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • But the ability to tag that data may be China’s true A.I. strength, the only one that the United States may not be able to match. In China, this new industry offers a glimpse of a future that the government has long promised: an economy built on technology rather than manufacturing.
  • “We’re the construction workers in the digital world. Our job is to lay one brick after another,” said Yi Yake, co-founder of a data labeling factory in Jiaxian, a city in central Henan province. “But we play an important role in A.I. Without us, they can’t build the skyscrapers.”
  • While A.I. engines are superfast learners and good at tackling complex calculations, they lack cognitive abilities that even the average 5-year-old possesses. Small children know that a furry brown cocker spaniel and a black Great Dane are both dogs. They can tell a Ford pickup from a Volkswagen Beetle, and yet they know both are cars.A.I. has to be taught. It must digest vast amounts of tagged photos and videos before it realizes that a black cat and a white cat are both cats. This is where the data factories and their workers come in.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “All the artificial intelligence is built on human labor,” Mr. Liang said.
  • “We’re the assembly lines 10 years ago,” said Mr. Yi, the co-founder of the data factory in Henan.
Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Steve Bosserman

The Digital Freedom Pass: Emancipation from digital slavery | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal - 0 views

voxeu.org/...s-emancipation-digital-slavery

privacy data management slavery policy

shared by Steve Bosserman on 22 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Digital identity management is currently undertaken by central identity providers, with users providing their data free to digital networks that own their digital identities. If users leave their digital networks, they must leave all their digital possessions, including their digital identities, behind. This system is analogous to slavery. It is neither efficient nor equitable. Users have no assurance that the value of the free data they provide bears any relation to the value of the free services they receive. The digital networks have overwhelming market power relative to their users. This column argues for reform in the form of a Digital Freedom Pass, – the digital equivalent of a wallet containing verified pieces of an individual’s digital identity. The person can then choose which identification to share, with whom, and when, allowing emancipation from our current digital slavery. 
Steve Bosserman

Germany Cracks Productivity Puzzle as Others Lag | Fast Forward | OZY - 0 views

www.ozy.com/...90249

productivity germany

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • “It’s clear that Germany has very distinct differences in its business structure and cultural makeup,” says Tony Danker, CEO of Be the Business, which campaigns to spread best practice on productivity to British companies. “There is real interest in continuous improvement and building business networks and institutions that focus on this. This spirit and activity feels eminently replicable even if the institutions are not.”
  • Indeed, a key difference between the U.K. and Germany lies in the training that workers receive. Although German managers are less likely to have higher educational qualifications, they have often received vocational training that builds workplace expertise. And despite the U.K. having more tertiary-educated managers than Germany, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show their actual skills, in literacy and data management, are lower.
Steve Bosserman

'Forget the Facebook leak': China is mining data directly from workers' brains on an in... - 0 views

www.scmp.com/...g-data-directly-workers-brains

employees china brain-reading data mining surveillance

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • The technology is in widespread use around the world but China has applied it on an unprecedented scale in factories, public transport, state-owned companies and the military to increase the competitiveness of its manufacturing industry and to maintain social stability.
  • Jin said that at present China’s brain-reading technology was on a par with that in the West but China was the only country where there had been reports of massive use of the technology in the workplace.
  • With improved speed and sensitivity, the device could even become a “mental keyboard” allowing the user to control a computer or mobile phone with their mind.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Qiao Zhian, professor of management psychology at Beijing Normal University, said that while the devices could make businesses more competitive the technology could also be abused by companies to control minds and infringe privacy, raising the spectre of “thought police”.
  • “There is no law or regulation to limit the use of this kind of equipment in China. The employer may have a strong incentive to use the technology for higher profit, and the employees are usually in too weak a position to say no,” he said.
  • Lawmakers should act now to limit the use of emotion surveillance and give workers more bargaining power to protect their interests, Qiao said. “The human mind should not be exploited for profit,” he said.
Steve Bosserman

How Instagram Saved Poetry - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...572746

instagram entrepreneurism writing poetry

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • In 2010, the editor of n+1 magazine, Chad Harbach, famously wrote that there were two distinct and rival literary cultures in America: the institutional, university-driven M.F.A. track and the New York–centered publishing world. But now there is a third option: the fast-paced, democratizing, hyper-connected culture of the internet. The poets of this third category often have little formal training, and their publishers are strewn across the country. Andrews McMeel, for instance, is an indie publisher in Missouri. Social media seem to have cracked the walls around a field that has long been seen as highbrow, exclusive, esoteric, and ruled by tradition, opening it up for young poets with broad appeal, many of whom are women and people of color.
  • Social-media poets, using Instagram as a marketing tool, are not just artists—they’re entrepreneurs. They still primarily earn money through publication and live events, but sharing their work on Instagram is now what opens up the possibility for both. Kaur, the ultimate poet-entrepreneur, said she approaches poetry like “running a business.” A day in the life can consist of all-day writing, touring, or, perhaps unprecedented for a poet, time in the office with her team to oversee operations and manage projects.
Steve Bosserman

High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ivers-ride-hailing-gig-economy

gamification gig economy taxi service incentive productivity profit

shared by Steve Bosserman on 23 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, to increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge”, workers’ behaviour.
  • According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organised by management to encourage workers to play the game. When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, focus). The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into a worker’s desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of profit for their employer.
  • Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Gaming the game, Burawoy observed, allowed workers to assert some limited control over the labour process, and to “make out” as a result. In turn, that win had the effect of reproducing the players’ commitment to playing, and their consent to the rules of the game. When players were unsuccessful, their dissatisfaction was directed at the game’s obstacles, not at the capitalist class, which sets the rules. The inbuilt antagonism between the player and the game replaces, in the mind of the worker, the deeper antagonism between boss and worker. Learning how to operate cleverly within the game’s parameters becomes the only imaginable option. And now there is another layer interposed between labour and capital: the algorithm.
Steve Bosserman

Citizen science efforts should be scaled up - SciDev.Net - 0 views

www.scidev.net/...forts-should-be-scaled-up.html

citizen science data collection biodiversity

shared by Steve Bosserman on 22 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • For instance, research institutions may work with local communities to help monitor biodiversity on habitats and species that the volunteers care about such as forests, species they hunt for food, economic or cultural reasons; the locals often have good knowledge of the diversity where they live. Global apps, such as iNaturalist or eBird, for urban groups, park managers and tourists can be promoted to help capture photographic records and species in certain locations.
Steve Bosserman

Toward Democratic, Lawful Citizenship for AIs, Robots, and Corporations - 0 views

blog.singularitynet.io/-and-corporations-cf70345bd009

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • If an AI canread the laws of a country (its Constitution and then relevant portions of the legal code)answer common-sense questions about these lawswhen presented with textual descriptions or videos of real-life situations, explain roughly what the laws imply about these situationsthen this AI has the level of understanding needed to manage the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
  • AI citizens would also presumably have responsibilities similar to those of human citizens, though perhaps with appropriate variations. Clearly, AI citizens would have tax obligations (and corporations already pay taxes, obviously, even though they are not considered autonomous citizens). If they also served on jury duty, this could be interesting, as they might provide a quite different perspective to human citizens. There is a great deal to be fleshed out here.
  • The question becomes: What kind of test can we give to validate that the AI really understands the Constitution, as opposed to just parroting back answers in a shallow but accurate way?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So we can say that passing a well-crafted AI Citizenship Test would bea sufficient condition for possessing a high level of human-like general intelligenceNOT a necessary condition for possessing a high level of general intelligence; nor even a necessary condition for possessing a high level of human-like general intelligenceNOT a sufficient condition for possessing precisely human-like intelligence (as required by the Turing Test or other similar tests)These limitations, however, do not make the notion of an AI Citizenship less interesting; in a way, they make it more interesting. What they tell us is: An AI Citizenship Test will be a specific type of general intelligence test that is specifically relevant to key aspects of modern society.
  • If you would like to voice your perspectives on the AI Citizenship Test, please feel free to participate here.
Steve Bosserman

How Facebook Is Throwing Our Brains Into Overdrive - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...ebook-is-a-digital-narco-state

facebook neuroscience manipulation

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • The human brain has always loved the dopamine rush of notifications, in any form; recent research indicates the unpredictable but ubiquitous updates of Gmail or Twitter carry the same neurological effect as rocking a slot machine. While Internet use is "not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," as cognitive scientist Tom Stafford noted in 2013, we continually chase those unpredictable payoffs on Facebook and Instagram in ways that tend to mirror gambling or sex addictions, even if "Internet addiction" writ large currently holds an ambiguous position in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
  • For products whose fundamental business proposition is harnessing attention, building those so-called "compulsion loops" isn't an accident of technology—it's the whole point. Indeed, observers have argued since Parker's "human psychology" flub last year that Facebook has not just meticulously measured, but fundamentally altered human behavior, and nascent technology ventures emboldened by Facebook's world-changing success have sought to translate the behavioral tricks that psychologist B.F. Skinner applied to the gambling kiosk to every mobile app under the sun. "When a gambler feels favored by luck, dopamine is released," Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, told the Guardian in March. All Facebook managed to do was find a way to miniaturize the captivating logic of the slot machine—with no cost to the user but their time and attention.
  • While the human brain is tremendously plastic, that doesn't mean Facebook is savagely rewiring the human brain. Indeed, the Facebook users in the Cal State–Fullerton study "showed greater activation of their amygdala and striatum, brain regions that are involved in impulsive behavior," as Live Science's Tia Ghose reported at the time. Ghose continued: "But unlike in the brains of cocaine addicts, for instance, the Facebook users showed no quieting of the brain systems responsible for inhibition in the prefrontal cortex." Facebook isn't fundamentally rewiring the structure of the human brain, but its ubiquity has the same relative effect by kicking our rewards centers into overdrive.
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