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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

How ant societies point to radical possibilities for humans | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...dical-possibilities-for-humans

distributed processes networks ant colonies division of labor

shared by Steve Bosserman on 19 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • A distributed process can be messy and not fully predictable, yet can provide greater resilience and robustness. Such distributed processes might not be ideal as one of the ‘major instruments of social stability’, in the words of the Director of Hatcheries in Brave New World, but they work beautifully in nature, from brains to ant colonies and, increasingly, in our own engineered networks
Steve Bosserman

Chris Hedges: In the Time of Trump, All We Have Is Each Other - Chris Hedges - Truthdig - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...we_have_is_each_other_20161225

localization distributed processes politics

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • We must begin again. Any hope for a restoration of civil society will come from small, local groups and community organizations. They will begin with the mundane tasks of holding back the expansion of charter schools, enforcing environmental regulations, building farmers markets, fighting for the minimum wage, giving sanctuary to undocumented workers, protesting hate crimes and electing people to local offices who will seek to mitigate the excesses of the state. “We have to reconstitute a civil society,” Schrecker said. “Intermediary institutions like the academy and the media have been hollowed out. Certainly, journalism is on life support. We have to resuscitate organizations and institutions that have atrophied.” “There is an attack on the American mind,” she said. “A lot of what we’re seeing with Trump is the product of 40 years of dumbing down.”
  • We must not become preoccupied with the short-term effects of resistance. Failure is inevitable for many of us. Tyrants have silenced voices of conscience in the past. They will do so again. We will endure by holding fast to our integrity, by building community and by spawning new institutions in the midst of the wreckage. We will sustain each other. Perhaps enough of us will endure to begin again.
Steve Bosserman

How Artists Are Bringing Blockchain to Their Neck of the Woods - 0 views

www.ozy.com/...87872

personhood art nature blockchain

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • It’s also a process that upends our deeply rooted legal norms that attach ownership to people. If we have historically tied ownership to the concept of natural or legal persons, what then happens, asks Kolling, if a non-human agent, whether a natural entity or a computer program, gains the ability to own? “Wouldn’t this ability come along with some kind of personhood?”
  • Kolling and his terra0 co-founders are part of a broader wave that’s ushering blockchain into the art world. Some are merely using the technology to verify the authenticity of particular works, but many artists want to go further. “Every system which plainly reproduces the old one is quite boring,” says Seidler, 29, who’s a head shorter than the lanky Kolling. “What interests me is using distributed ledgers as experimental systems where issues of autonomy, value and cooperation can be renegotiated.”
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