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Javier E

Technology Imperialism, the Californian Ideology, and the Future of Higher Education - 2 views

hackeducation.com/...technoimperialism

imperialism education trends learning ideology california narrative silicon valley

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • What I hope to make explicit today is how much California – the place, the concept, “the dream machine” – shapes (wants to shape) the future of technology and the future of education.
  • In an announcement on Facebook – of course – Zuckerberg argued that “connectivity is a human right.”
  • As Zuckerberg frames it at least, the “human right” in this case is participation in the global economy
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  • This is a revealing definition of “human rights,” I’d argue, particularly as it’s one that never addresses things like liberty, equality, or justice. It never addresses freedom of expression or freedom of assembly or freedom of association.
  • in certain countries, a number of people say they do not use the Internet yet they talk about how much time they spend on Facebook. According to one survey, 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. A survey in Nigeria had similar results:
  • Evgeny Morozov has described this belief as “Internet-centrism,” an ideology he argues permeates the tech industry, its PR wing the tech blogosphere, and increasingly government policy
  • “Internet-centrism” describes the tendency to see “the Internet” – Morozov uses quotations around the phrase – as a new yet unchanging, autonomous, benevolent, and inevitable socio-technological development. “The Internet” is a master framework for how all institutions will supposedly operate moving forward
  • “The opportunity to connect” as a human right assumes that “connectivity” will hasten the advent of these other rights, I suppose – that the Internet will topple dictatorships, for example, that it will extend participation in civic life to everyone and, for our purposes here at this conference, that it will “democratize education.”
  • Empire is not simply an endeavor of the nation-state – we have empire through technology (that’s not new) and now, the technology industry as empire.
  • Facebook is really just synecdochal here, I should add – just one example of the forces I think are at play, politically, economically, technologically, culturally.
  • it matters at the level of ideology. Infrastructure is ideological, of course. The new infrastructure – “the Internet” if you will – has a particular political, economic, and cultural bent to it. It is not neutral.
  • This infrastructure matters. In this case, this is a French satellite company (Eutelsat). This is an American social network (Facebook). Mark Zuckerberg’s altruistic rhetoric aside, this is their plan – an economic plan – to monetize the world’s poor.
  • The content and the form of “connectivity” perpetuate imperialism, and not only in Africa but in all of our lives. Imperialism at the level of infrastructure – not just cultural imperialism but technological imperialism
  • “The Silicon Valley Narrative,” as I call it, is the story that the technology industry tells about the world – not only the world-as-is but the world-as-Silicon-Valley-wants-it-to-be.
  • To better analyze and assess both technology and education technology requires our understanding of these as ideological, argues Neil Selwyn – “‘a site of social struggle’ through which hegemonic positions are developed, legitimated, reproduced and challenged.”
  • This narrative has several commonly used tropes
  • It often features a hero: the technology entrepreneur. Smart. Independent. Bold. Risk-taking. White. Male
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” invokes themes like “innovation” and “disruption.” It privileges the new; everything else that can be deemed “old” is viewed as obsolete.
  • It contends that its workings are meritocratic: anyone who hustles can make it.
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” fosters a distrust of institutions – the government, the university. It is neoliberal. It hates paying taxes.
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” draws from the work of Ayn Rand; it privileges the individual at all costs; it calls this “personalization.”
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” does not neatly co-exist with public education. We forget this at our peril. This makes education technology, specifically, an incredibly fraught area.
  • Here’s the story I think we like to hear about ed-tech, about distance education, about “connectivity” and learning: Education technology is supportive, not exploitative. Education technology opens, not forecloses, opportunities. Education technology is driven by a rethinking of teaching and learning, not expanding markets or empire. Education technology meets individual and institutional and community goals.
  • That’s not really what the “Silicon Valley narrative” says about education
  • It is interested in data extraction and monetization and standardization and scale. It is interested in markets and return on investment. “Education is broken,” and technology will fix it
  • If “Silicon Valley” isn’t quite accurate, then I must admit that the word “narrative” is probably inadequate too
  • The better term here is “ideology.”
  • Facebook is “the Internet” for a fairly sizable number of people. They know nothing else – conceptually, experientially. And, let’s be honest, Facebook wants to be “the Internet” for everyone.
  • We tend to not see technology as ideological – its connections to libertarianism, neoliberalism, global capitalism, empire.
  • The California ideology ignores race and labor and the water supply; it is sustained by air and fantasy. It is built upon white supremacy and imperialism.
  • As is the technology sector, which has its own history, of course, in warfare and cryptography.
  • So far this year, some $3.76 billion of venture capital has been invested in education technology – a record-setting figure. That money will change the landscape – that’s its intention. That money carries with it a story about the future; it carries with it an ideology.
  • When a venture capitalist says that “software is eating the world,” we can push back on the inevitability implied in that. We can resist – not in the name of clinging to “the old” as those in educational institutions are so often accused of doing – but we can resist in the name of freedom and justice and a future that isn’t dictated by the wealthiest white men in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
  • We in education would be naive, I think, to think that the designs that venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs have for us would be any less radical than creating a new state, like Draper’s proposed state of Silicon Valley, that would enormously wealthy and politically powerful.
  • When I hear talk of “unbundling” in education – one of the latest gerunds you’ll hear venture capitalists and ed-tech entrepreneurs invoke, meaning the disassembling of institutions into products and services – I can’t help but think of the “unbundling” that Draper wished to do to my state: carving up land and resources, shifting tax revenue and tax burdens, creating new markets, privatizing public institutions, redistributing power and doing so explicitly not in the service of equity or justice.
  • I want to show you this map, a proposal – a failed proposal, thankfully – by venture capitalist Tim Draper to split the state of California into six separate states: Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California. The proposal, which Draper tried to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot in California, would have created the richest state in the US – Silicon Valley would be first in per-capita income. It would also have created the nation’s poorest state, Central California, which would rank even below Mississippi.
  • that’s not all that Silicon Valley really does.
caelengrubb

The Linguistic Colonialism of English - Brown Political Review - 0 views

brownpoliticalreview.org/...linguistic-colonialism-english

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.
  • As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.
  • The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.
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  • Processes of violent imperialism have paved the way for the cultural pandemic originating in the West
  • Most former British colonies now use English as their official language (e.g. Ghana and South Africa). Ever since the US colonized Puerto Rico after winning the Spanish-American war (note the absence of Puerto Rico, or Cuba, in the name of the war), the official languages on the island became Spanish and, of course, English.
  • Today, English is the third most spoken language in the world and tops the list of second languages. English is a necessity for studying at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, a ticket to working almost anywhere in the world, and an instrument enabling a livelihood in the wealthiest nations.
  • This phenomenon feeds into the growth of social inequality linked to globalization. The majority of the time, English learned as a second language in public schools does not create a proficiency level adequate for working, studying, or relying on the language in daily life.
  • People dedicate their time and resources to learning and perfecting their understanding and knowledge of English, rather than preserving their own customs and culture.
  • The process of globalization leads people to visualize an array of opportunities and an exponentially better future linked to the English language. A language is not only an instrument of communication, however. It is also the tool of a society, made up of its culture, traditions, and sets of religious and ideological beliefs
  • English has also become the main language used in science. Doctors around the world use English to communicate their findings. Most research papers are written in English as a way to facilitate international scientific cooperation.
  • Although this may seem like a necessity to promote scientific discovery, the resulting gap is problematic. The researchers who have not had the chance to learn English are at a disadvantage.
  • These processes suggest a disconcerting implication – globalization is simply a more “socially acceptable” means of imperialism, without violence
  • Globalization and the expansion of the English language have resulted in oppression and inequality.
  • If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances.
Javier E

China: A Modern Babel - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hina-a-modern-babel-1487202893

china mandarin language

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The oft-repeated claim that we must all learn Mandarin Chinese, the better to trade with our future masters, is one that readers of David Moser’s “A Billion Voices” will rapidly end up re-evaluating.
  • In fact, many Chinese don’t speak it: Even Chinese authorities quietly admit that only about 70% of the population speaks Mandarin, and merely one in 10 of those speak it fluently.
  • Mr. Moser presents a history of what is more properly called Putonghua, or “common speech,” along with a clear, concise and often amusing introduction to the limits of its spoken and written forms.
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  • what Chinese schoolchildren are encouraged to think of as the longstanding natural speech of the common people is in fact an artificial hybrid, only a few decades old, although it shares a name—Mandarin—with the language of administration from imperial times. It’s a designed-by-committee camel of a language that has largely lost track of its past.
  • The idea of a national Chinese language began with the realization by the accidentally successful revolutionaries of 1911 that retaining control over a country speaking multiple languages and myriad dialects would necessitate reform. Long-term unification and the introduction of mass education would require a common language.
  • Whatever the province they originated from, the administrators of the now-toppled Great Qing Empire had all learned to communicate with one another in a second common language—Guanhua, China’s equivalent, in practical terms, of medieval Latin
  • To understand this highly compressed idiom required a considerable knowledge of the Chinese classics. Early Jesuit missionaries had labeled it Mandarin,
  • The committee decided that the four-tone dialect of the capital would be the base for a new national language but added a fifth tone whose use had lapsed in the north but not in southern dialects. The result was a language that no one actually spoke.
  • After the Communist victory of 1949, the process began all over again with fresh conferences, leading finally to the decision to use Beijing sounds, northern dialects and modern literature in the vernacular (of which there was very little) as a source of grammar.
  • This new spoken form is what is now loosely labeled Mandarin, still as alien to most Chinese as all the other Chinese languages.
  • A Latin alphabet system called Pinyin was introduced to help children learn to pronounce Chinese characters, but today it is usually abandoned after the first few years of elementary school.
  • The view that Mandarin is too difficult for mere foreigners to learn is essential to Chinese amour propre. But it is belied by the number of foreign high-school students who now learn the language by using Pinyin as a key to pronunciation —and who bask in the admiration they receive as a result.
  • Since 1949, the Chinese government, obsessed with promoting the image of a nation completely united in its love of the Communist Party, has decided that the Chinese people speak not several different languages but the same one in a variety of dialects. To say otherwise is to suggest, dangerously, that China is not one nation
  • Yet on Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic in a Hunan accent so thick that members of his audience subsequently differed about what he had said. He never mastered the Beijing sounds on which Putonghua is based, nor did Sichuanese-speaking Deng Xiaoping or most of his successors.
  • When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced. “At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!” One leader down, only 400 million more common people to go.
Javier E

English Is a Dialect With an Army - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...278300

language English African-American culture imperialism bilingualism multiculturalism

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • I am getting some small notion of what it feels like to be white in America. What my classmates are telling me is that the Anglophone world is the international power. It dominates. Thus knowledge is tangibly necessary for them in a way that it is not for me
  • Of course the flip-side of this calculus is that power enables ignorance. Black people know this well.
  • I think this is the seed of the "We don't have any white history month!" syndrome. Through conquest the ways of whiteness become the air.
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  • But once those ways are apprehended by the conquered--as they must be--they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding, and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes and yet finds oddly compelling. And all the while the conquered still enjoys her own private home. She need not be amnesiac, only bilingual
  • . The phrase "code-switching" is overdone, but there is no cultural code from which all white people can "switch" from. It's not even a code. It's just the world. 
  • In the context of France, je suis américan. I am an aspect of the great power.
  • There is no "nigger" for me, no private language, no private way of being all my own. And with that comes a great feeling of weakness and shame.
  • the literature of slavemasters is filled with exasperation over their slaves laughing at invisible jokes.
Javier E

What I Discovered by Visiting Every Disney Park - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isiting-every-disney-park.html

Disney comparison international

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Disney haters have long criticized the company’s overseas parks as products of cultural imperialism: the evil Mickey Mousification of the globe.
  • I thought about what visiting the 13 parks had taught me about how Disney operates, particularly overseas. Far from monolithic, the company’s theme park empire is full of quirky surprises. Yes, the notion of Disney as a cultural bulldozer needs to be retired — especially as it builds a 14th park in Shanghai that will be the first to do away with a Main Street-style entrance. (Instead there will be a vast garden that will accommodate Chinese cultural festivals.)
  • To compete with the splendor of Paris, Disney spent lavishly to open the resort in 1992, and its ornate landscaping has only improved with age: Austrian black pines, endless rhododendrons, pathways that hug serpentine streams. Of all the Disney castles, the one here is the most extravagant.
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  • “We made some mistakes early on, but we learned from them,” a senior Disney executive once said to me. “How can you judge us without seeing for yourself?”
  • At the end of the day, what makes a Disney park unique are the people who occupy it.
  • In France visitors stroll along those glorious garden paths — no rushing to the rides. Disney World in Florida is a melting pot endurance test, while the original Disneyland in California relies less on tourists than on annual pass-holding locals. Tokyo visitors, once completing that initial sprint, stand politely and quietly in tidy lines; Hong Kong attendees from mainland China show little interest in personal space, even leaning on one another in the ride queues, and go gaga for simple go-in-a-circle rides that would bore most Americans.
Javier E

Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373680

soccer US history exceptionalism sports identity integration immigration politics youth attitudes

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Ann Coulter penned a column explaining why soccer is un-American. First, it’s collectivist. (“Individual achievement is not a big factor…blame is dispersed.”) Second, it’s effeminate. (“It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”) Third, it’s culturally elitist. (“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.”) Fourth, and most importantly, “It’s foreign…Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.”
  • Soccer hatred, in other words, exemplifies American exceptionalism.
  • For Coulter and many contemporary conservatives, by contrast, part of what makes America exceptional is its individualism, manliness and populism
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  • Coulter’s deeper point is that for America to truly be America, it must stand apart
  • The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.
  • America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.
  • I wrote an essay entitled “The End of American Exceptionalism,” which argued that on subjects where the United States has long been seen as different, attitudes in America increasingly resemble those in Europe. Soccer is one of the best examples yet.
  • “Soccer,” Markovits and Hellerman argue, “was perceived by both native-born Americans and immigrants as a non-American activity at a time in American history when nativism and nationalism emerged to create a distinctly American self-image … if one liked soccer, one was viewed as at least resisting—if not outright rejecting—integration into America.”
  • The average age of Americans who call baseball their favorite sport is 53. Among Americans who like football best, it’s 46. Among Americans who prefer soccer, by contrast, the average age is only 37.
  • Old-stock Americans, in other words, were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.
  • why is interest in soccer rising now? Partly, because the United States is yet again witnessing mass immigration from soccer-mad nations.
  • the key shift is that America’s sports culture is less nativist. More native-born Americans now accept that a game invented overseas can become authentically American, and that the immigrants who love it can become authentically American too. Fewer believe that to have merit, something must be invented in the United States.
  • why didn’t soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, when it was gaining dominance in Europe? Precisely because it was gaining dominance in Europe. The arbiters of taste in late 19th and early 20th century America wanted its national pastimes to be exceptional.
  • Americans over the age of 50 were 15 points more likely to say “our culture is superior” than were people over 50 in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France
  • Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to say “our culture is superior” than their counterparts in Germany, Spain, and Britain.
  • Americans today are less likely to insist that America’s way of doing things is always best. In 2002, 60 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that, “our culture is superior to others.” By 2011, it was down to 49 percent.
  • the third major pro-soccer constituency is liberals. They’re willing to embrace a European sport for the same reason they’re willing to embrace a European-style health care system: because they see no inherent value in America being an exception to the global rule
  • When the real-estate website Estately created a seven part index to determine a state’s love of soccer, it found that Washington State, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey—all bright blue—loved soccer best, while Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Mississippi and Montana—all bright red—liked it least.
  • the soccer coalition—immigrants, liberals and the young—looks a lot like the Obama coalition.
  • Sports-wise, therefore, Democrats constitute an alliance between soccer and basketball fans while Republicans disproportionately follow baseball, golf, and NASCAR. Football, by far America’s most popular sport, crosses the aisle.)
  • The willingness of growing numbers of Americans to embrace soccer bespeaks their willingness to imagine a different relationship with the world. Historically, conservative foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and imperialism. America must either retreat from the world or master it. It cannot be one among equals, bound by the same rules as everyone else
  • Exceptionalists view sports the same way. Coulter likes football, baseball, and basketball because America either plays them by itself, or—when other countries play against us—we dominate them.
  • Embracing soccer, by contrast, means embracing America’s role as merely one nation among many, without special privileges. It’s no coincidence that young Americans, in addition to liking soccer, also like the United Nations. In 2013, Pew found that Americans under 30 were 24 points more favorable to the U.N. than Americans over 50.
  • Millennials were also 23 points more likely than the elderly to say America should take its allies’ opinion into account even if means compromising our desires.
  • In embracing soccer, Americans are learning to take something we neither invented nor control, and nonetheless make it our own. It’s a skill we’re going to need in the years to come.
Javier E

Five months on, what scientists now know about the coronavirus | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...now-know-about-the-coronavirus

Covid-19 theory results research science Knowledge

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The Sars-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, which have evolved fierce immune responses to viruses, researchers have discovered. These defences drive viruses to replicate faster so that they can get past bats’ immune defences. In turn, that transforms the bat into a reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses
  • “This virus probably jumped from a bat into another animal, and that other animal was probably near a human, maybe in a market,
  • Virus-ridden particles are inhaled by others and come into contact with cells lining the throat and larynx. These cells have large numbers of receptors – known as Ace-2 receptors – on their surfaces. (Cell receptors play a key role in passing chemicals into cells and in triggering signals between cells.
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  • “This virus has a surface protein that is primed to lock on that receptor and slip its RNA into the cell,”
  • Once inside, that RNA inserts itself into the cell’s own replication machinery and makes multiple copies of the virus. These burst out of the cell, and the infection spreads. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system eventually target the virus and in most cases halt its progress.
  • “A Covid-19 infection is generally mild, and that really is the secret of the virus’s success,” adds Ball. “Many people don’t even notice they have got an infection and so go around their work, homes and supermarkets infecting others.”
  • the virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. In these cases, patients will require treatment in intensive care.
  • Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation
  • This process can run out of control, more immune cells pour in, and the inflammation gets worse. This is known as a cytokine storm.
  • Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear
  • Doctors examining patients recovering from a Covid-19 infection are finding fairly high levels of neutralising antibodies in their blood. These antibodies are made by the immune system, and they coat an invading virus at specific points, blocking its ability to break into cells.
  • “It is clear that immune responses are being mounted against Covid-19 in infected people,” says virologist Mike Skinner of Imperial College London. “And the antibodies created by that response will provide protection against future infections – but we should note that it is unlikely this protection will be for life.”
  • Instead, most virologists believe that immunity against Covid-19 will last only a year or two. “That is in line with other coronaviruses that infect humans,
  • “That means that even if most people do eventually become exposed to the virus, it is still likely to become endemic – which means we would see seasonal peaks of infection of this disease. We will have reached a steady state with regard to Covid-19.”
  • Skinner is doubtful. “We have got to consider this pandemic from the virus’s position,” he says. “It is spreading round the world very nicely. It is doing OK. Change brings it no benefit.”
  • In the end, it will be the development and roll-out of an effective vaccine that will free us from the threat of Covid-19,
  • the journal Nature reported that 78 vaccine projects had been launched round the globe – with a further 37 in development.
  • vaccines require large-scale safety and efficacy studies. Thousands of people would receive either the vaccine itself or a placebo to determine if the former were effective at preventing infection from the virus which they would have encountered naturally. That, inevitably, is a lengthy process.
  • some scientists have proposed a way to speed up the process – by deliberately exposing volunteers to the virus to determine a vaccine’s efficacy.
  • Volunteers would have to be young and healthy, he stresses: “Their health would also be closely monitored, and they would have access to intensive care and any available medicines.”
  • The result could be a vaccine that would save millions of lives by being ready for use in a much shorter time than one that went through standard phase three trials.
  • phase-three trials are still some way off, so we have time to consider the idea carefully.”
Javier E

How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...societal-collapse.html

collapse civilization decline history crisis politics economics culture complexity

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
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  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
katherineharron

Analysis: It's time to give some bigots a break - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • What if this ritual of going after people like the weatherman actually reinforces racism and other "isms" instead of combating them?
  • What if this hyper-focus on an individual's wrong distracts us from directing our outrage at the most destructive forms of intolerance -- the kind that's baked so much into our everyday lives that we hardly notice them?
  • "We make these kind of superficial scapegoats that we can use to make ourselves feel better about racism, but we don't address policies, practices or structures," she says. "To the white people who are clutching their pearls, I really have to ask: How integrated is your life? Yeah, you voted for Obama twice, but do you have any black friends?"
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  • "If you're Latino, you'll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you're an elderly woman, you'll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you're a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you're less intelligent than if you were slim."
  • "Damn," I thought. "I just racially profiled a black man -- and I'm black!"
  • The experience didn't just humble me, it scared me. If I -- someone who is black and has read about race and bias for years -- could act like this, what was possible for others who never thought much about these issues?
  • Perhaps there's another way. Our language and behavior should evolve. We shouldn't talk about racism, for example, as an either/or proposition: Use a slur and you're the Grand Imperial Wizard of the KKK; if you've never used one you're free of intolerance.
  • Here's a little secret that I think many minorities can identify with. Sure, we get angry when people get caught saying or doing the wrong thing. But we get angrier when others claim they could never be like those people.
  • One of my best friends is a fellow bigot -- a white minister I've known for years. He freely admits he still struggles with the racism he absorbed growing up in the segregated South.
  • We should never retreat from calling out the unapologetic cruelty that we see flashed across social media.
sanderk

LANGUAGE HAS THE POWER TO DIVIDE AS WELL AS UNITE - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

www.chicagotribune.com/...92-06-09-9202210199-story.html

language divide research

shared by sanderk on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Hungarians tend to speak softly and in something of a monotone. This could reflect their language, every word of which is accented on its first syllable. Furthermore, Hungarians must know that theirs is a strange language. Well, aren`t they all, to everyone who does not understand them? And isn`t calling a language ''strange'' a sign of cultural imperialism?
  • we have one reasonable excuse and one bad one. The bad one is that education in America seems interested in almost everything except passing on detailed information at the cost of arduous application. The acceptable excuse is that it really is less important for Americans to learn languages. Most of us live far from places where people don`t speak English.
  • The other cause of awkwardness is that the foreign language almost everyone learns these days is English. This is convenient, but it enhances the likelihood that the rest of the world will consider Americans arrogant.
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  • If, eventually, everyone speaks his own language and English, is it only a matter of time before the other languages are forgotten, except by scholars, sentimentalists and curmudgeons?
  • While the worlds of science, commerce and popular culture unite around English, people are killing each other because they speak different languages.
  • Language divides as much as does land or blood, and almost as much as religion.
  • Such is the power of language that it can be used to make division where it barely exists. Ethnically, Belorussians are all but indistinguishable from Russians. Wanting independence from Moscow, the Russians who live around Minsk claim that theirs is a separate language, though many scholars consider it
tongoscar

Housing costs, migration expected to crimp Southern California's economy - Daily News - 0 views

www.dailynews.com/...p-southern-californias-economy

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Southern California’s economy remains strong, but it’s expected to lag slightly behind the state through 2021, according to a new report.
  • On the plus side, per capita income growth is expected to continue to outpace the nation and state, buoyed by strong employment in the construction, logistics, professional services and healthcare industries.
  • Long-term regional investments in transportation — most notably the Southern California Optimized Rail Expansion — will help boost growth in the area, the report said. The $10 billion capital improvement program, which runs from 2018 through 2028, includes track additions, station improvements and better signals and grade crossings to improve safety where trains cross surface streets.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It’s projected to generate 1.3 million jobs and provide a $684 billion boost to Southern California’s economy.
  • Southern California is expected to add 129,800 jobs this year and 128,300 in 2021. This year’s biggest employment gain of 52,500 jobs will come in education and health services, the report said, with other sizable increases in leisure and hospitality (20,600), professional and business services (18,900) trade, transportation and utilities (13,200) and construction, natural resources and mining (12,100).
  • The report defines Southern California as a 10-county region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Imperial, Kern and San Luis Obispo counties.
Javier E

UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia | Mathematics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...prize-in-academia-breakthrough

math prize randomness

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.
  • Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.
  • His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “regularity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.
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  • After dallying with physics at university, Hairer moved into mathematics. The realisation that ideas in theoretical physics can be overturned and swiftly consigned to the dustbin did not appeal. “I wouldn’t really want to put my name to a result that could be superseded by something else three years later,” he said. “In mathematics, if you obtain a result then that is it. It’s the universality of mathematics, you discover absolute truths.”
  • Hairer’s expertise lies in stochastic partial differential equations, a branch of mathematics that describes how randomness throws disorder into processes such as the movement of wind in a wind tunnel or the creeping boundary of a water droplet landing on a tissue. When the randomness is strong enough, solutions to the equations get out of control. “In some cases, the solutions fluctuate so wildly that it is not even clear what the equation meant in the first place,” he said.
  • With the invention of regularity structures, Hairer showed how the infinitely jagged noise that threw his equations into chaos could be reframed and tamed.
Javier E

A Coded Word From the Far Right Roils France's Political Mainstream - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vagement-far-right-racism.html

language bias france

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • As with many things in France, an unresolved colonial history lies below the surface of the battle over the word ensauvagement.
  • The word is a direct outgrowth of France’s colonial and slave-trading past, a history that the French have yet to come to terms with and that they have often preferred to ignore, said Pascal Blanchard, a historian on French colonialism and its enduring impact on French society.
  • More than any other imperial power, France justified colonialism by describing it as a “civilizing mission,” Mr. Blanchard said.
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  • “The idea of guiding savages out of the darkness into the light was omnipresent in France’s discourse,” he said. “The idea of the savage is still deeply rooted in French society.”
  • “The word benefits from ambiguity and works in France’s collective consciousness by letting the person using it avoid being directly called a racist,
  • “Césaire goes further by saying that Nazism was the product of the ensauvagement of Europe,” said Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies in France, adding that a genocide committed by Germans in their former African colony in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century is widely regarded as a precursor of the Holocaust.
  • But stripped of its historical meaning, ensauvagement can literally mean, in French, the state of becoming wild.
  • Aimé Césaire, the anticolonial writer from Martinique, even tried to turn the word ensauvagement against Europe in the 1950s. In “Discourse on Colonialism,” he wrote that Europeans had dehumanized themselves through the brutality of colonialism in Africa and that they themselves had turned into savages.
  • That is why the word appeared to have slipped into the mainstream recently, he said.
  • “It is necessary to stop the ensauvagement of a certain part of the society,” Mr. Darmanin, the interior minister, told the newspaper Le Figaro in late July.
  • “There are no savages in France,” Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker, told the minister in Parliament. “There are only citizens.”
  • The minister defended himself, saying that his use of the word had nothing to do with immigration or ethnicity, adding, “I’m miles away from that.”
  • In an interview this week, Mr. Houlié said that Mr. Macron and his party came to power in 2017 promising to reconcile the French. But by using ensauvagement, he said, “We recreate divisions, we create new fractures.”
  • The justice minister, Eric Dupont-Moretti, told a French radio station on Monday that he would not use the term because “ensauvagement is a word that fuels the feeling of insecurity.”
  • The very same day, Marlène Schiappa, a junior minister for equality, said, “It doesn’t bother me to talk about an ensauvagement of society, because it’s a reality, quite simply.”
  • Mr. Darmanin hardened his position by insisting its usage was legitimate — a stance considered especially significant because he oversees the national police as interior minister
  • “Ensauvagement is coded language to mean young, violent youths of sub-Saharan or North African origin,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “And that opens the door to policies on immigration, police checkpoints, and it could be used to justify police violence.”
  • “If police officers are dealing with savages, well, then, it’s legitimate that they use violent means to control these so-called savages,” he said
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uscism-ukraine-russia-war.html

ukraine language code code-switching russia russian

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again
  • Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire.
  • “Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.”
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  • The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II.
  • The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade.
  • Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk, they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction
  • we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.
  • A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations
  • I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention.
  • Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.
  • “Pашизм” is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself.
  • Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them
  • Those six Cyrillic letters contain references to Italian, Russian and English, all of which a mechanical, letter-by-letter transliteration would block
  • The best (if imperfect) way I have found to render “рашизм” from Ukrainian into English is “ruscism”
  • When we see “ruscism” we might guess this word has to do with Russia (“rus”), with politics (“ism”) and with the extreme right (“ascism”) — as, indeed, it does
  • I have had to spell “рашизм” as “ruscism” in English because we need “rus,” with a “u,” to see the reference to Russia. In losing the original Ukrainian “a,” though, we weaken a multilayered reference — because the “a” in “рашизм,” conveniently, allows the Ukrainian word to associate Russia and fascism in a way English cannot.
  • If you don’t know either language, you might think that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are.
  • the semantics are not that close
  • From a Russian perspective, the false friends are legion. There is an elegant four-syllable Ukrainian word that simply means “soon” or “without delay,” but to a Russian it sounds like “not behind the bar.” The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.”
  • Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they have learned it.
  • Ukrainian soldiers often speak Russian, though they are instructed to use Ukrainian to spot infiltrators and spies. This is a drastic example of a general practice of code-switching.
  • Ukrainians are perfectly capable of writing Russian correctly, but during the war some internet commentators have spelled the occasional Russian word using the Ukrainian writing system, leaving it looking unmoored and pitiable. Writing in Ukrainian, you might spell “oсвобождение” as “aсвобaждениe,” the way it is pronounced — a bit of lexicographic alchemy that makes it (and, by extension, Russians) look silly, and mocks the political concepts being used to justify a war. In a larger sense, such efforts are a means of displacing Russia from its central position in regional culture.
Javier E

The AI is eating itself - by Casey Newton - Platformer - 0 views

www.platformer.news/...the-ai-is-eating-itself

AI effects threat internet inputs human knowledge research bias technology

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • there also seems to be little doubt that is corroding the web.
  • , two new studies offered some cause for alarm. (I discovered both in the latest edition of Import AI, the indispensable weekly newsletter from Anthropic co-founder and former journalist Jack Clark.)
  • The first study, which had an admittedly small sample size, found that crowd-sourced workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turks platforms increasingly admit to using LLMs to perform text-based tasks.
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  • Until now, the assumption has been that they will answer truthfully based on their own experiences. In a post-ChatGPT world, though, academics can no longer make that assumption. Given the mostly anonymous, transactional nature of the assignment, it’s easy to imagine a worker signing up to participate in a large number of studies and outsource all their answers to a bot. This “raises serious concerns about the gradual dilution of the ‘human factor’ in crowdsourced text data,” the researchers write.
  • “This, if true, has big implications,” Clark writes. “It suggests the proverbial mines from which companies gather the supposed raw material of human insights are now instead being filled up with counterfeit human intelligence.”
  • A second, more worrisome study comes from researchers at the University of Oxford,  University of Cambridge, University of Toronto, and Imperial College London. It found that training AI systems on data generated by other AI systems — synthetic data, to use the industry’s term — causes models to degrade and ultimately collapse. While the decay can be managed by using synthetic data sparingly, researchers write, the idea that models can be “poisoned” by feeding them their own outputs raises real risks for the web
  • that’s a problem, because — to bring together the threads of today’s newsletter so far — AI output is spreading to encompass more of the web every day.“The obvious larger question,” Clark writes, “is what this does to competition among AI developers as the internet fills up with a greater percentage of generated versus real content.”
  • In The Verge, Vincent argues that the current wave of disruption will ultimately bring some benefits, even if it’s only to unsettle the monoliths that have dominated the web for so long. “Even if the web is flooded with AI junk, it could prove to be beneficial, spurring the development of better-funded platforms, he writes. “If Google consistently gives you garbage results in search, for example, you might be more inclined to pay for sources you trust and visit them directly.”
  • the glut of AI text will leave us with a web where the signal is ever harder to find in the noise. Early results suggest that these fears are justified — and that soon everyone on the internet, no matter their job, may soon find themselves having to exert ever more effort seeking signs of intelligent life.
Javier E

Opinion | Elon Musk, Geoff Hinton, and the War Over A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...i-safety-ethics-effective.html

ai threat faction technology research language

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Beneath almost all of the testimony, the manifestoes, the blog posts and the public declarations issued about A.I. are battles among deeply divided factions
  • Some are concerned about far-future risks that sound like science fiction.
  • Some are genuinely alarmed by the practical problems that chatbots and deepfake video generators are creating right now.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Some are motivated by potential business revenue, others by national security concerns.
  • Sometimes, they trade letters, opinion essays or social threads outlining their positions and attacking others’ in public view. More often, they tout their viewpoints without acknowledging alternatives, leaving the impression that their enlightened perspective is the inevitable lens through which to view A.I.
  • you’ll realize this isn’t really a debate only about A.I. It’s also a contest about control and power, about how resources should be distributed and who should be held accountable.
  • It is critical that we begin to recognize the ideologies driving what we are being told. Resolving the fracas requires us to see through the specter of A.I. to stay true to the humanity of our values.
  • Because language itself is part of their battleground, the different A.I. camps tend not to use the same words to describe their positions
  • One faction describes the dangers posed by A.I. through the framework of safety, another through ethics or integrity, yet another through security and others through economics.
  • The Doomsayers
  • These are the A.I. safety people, and their ranks include the “Godfathers of A.I.,” Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. For many years, these leading lights battled critics who doubted that a computer could ever mimic capabilities of the human mind
  • Many doomsayers say they are acting rationally, but their hype about hypothetical existential risks amounts to making a misguided bet with our future
  • Reasonable sounding on their face, these ideas can become dangerous if stretched to their logical extremes. A dogmatic long-termer would willingly sacrifice the well-being of people today to stave off a prophesied extinction event like A.I. enslavement.
  • The technology historian David C. Brock calls these fears “wishful worries” — that is, “problems that it would be nice to have, in contrast to the actual agonies of the present.”
  • OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom lead dominant A.I. companies, are pushing for A.I. regulations that they say will protect us from criminals and terrorists. Such regulations would be expensive to comply with and are likely to preserve the market position of leading A.I. companies while restricting competition from start-ups
  • the roboticist Rodney Brooks has pointed out that we will see the existential risks coming, the dangers will not be sudden and we will have time to change course.
  • While we shouldn’t dismiss the Hollywood nightmare scenarios out of hand, we must balance them with the potential benefits of A.I. and, most important, not allow them to strategically distract from more immediate concerns.
  • The Reformers
  • While the doomsayer faction focuses on the far-off future, its most prominent opponents are focused on the here and now. We agree with this group that there’s plenty already happening to cause concern: Racist policing and legal systems that disproportionately arrest and punish people of color. Sexist labor systems that rate feminine-coded résumés lower
  • Superpower nations automating military interventions as tools of imperialism and, someday, killer robots.
  • Propagators of these A.I. ethics concerns — like Meredith Broussard, Safiya Umoja Noble, Rumman Chowdhury and Cathy O’Neil — have been raising the alarm on inequities coded into A.I. for years. Although we don’t have a census, it’s noticeable that many leaders in this cohort are people of color, women and people who identify as L.G.B.T.Q.
  • Others frame efforts to reform A.I. in terms of integrity, calling for Big Tech to adhere to an oath to consider the benefit of the broader public alongside — or even above — their self-interest. They point to social media companies’ failure to control hate speech or how online misinformation can undermine democratic elections. Adding urgency for this group is that the very companies driving the A.I. revolution have, at times, been eliminating safeguards
  • reformers tend to push back hard against the doomsayers’ focus on the distant future. They want to wrestle the attention of regulators and advocates back toward present-day harms that are exacerbated by A.I. misinformation, surveillance and inequity.
  • Integrity experts call for the development of responsible A.I., for civic education to ensure A.I. literacy and for keeping humans front and center in A.I. systems.
  • Surely, we are a civilization big enough to tackle more than one problem at a time; even those worried that A.I. might kill us in the future should still demand that it not profile and exploit us in the present.
  • Other groups of prognosticators cast the rise of A.I. through the language of competitiveness and national security.
  • Some arguing from this perspective are acting on genuine national security concerns, and others have a simple motivation: money. These perspectives serve the interests of American tech tycoons as well as the government agencies and defense contractors they are intertwined with.
  • they appear deeply invested in the idea that there is no limit to what their creations will be able to accomplish.
  • U.S. megacompanies pleaded to exempt their general purpose A.I. from the tightest regulations, and whether and how to apply high-risk compliance expectations on noncorporate open-source models emerged as a key point of debate. All the while, some of the moguls investing in upstart companies are fighting the regulatory tide. The Inflection AI co-founder Reid Hoffman argued, “The answer to our challenges is not to slow down technology but to accelerate it.”
  • The warriors’ narrative seems to misrepresent that science and engineering are different from what they were during the mid-20th century. A.I. research is fundamentally international; no one country will win a monopoly.
  • As the science-fiction author Ted Chiang has said, fears about the existential risks of A.I. are really fears about the threat of uncontrolled capitalism
  • Regulatory solutions do not need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we need to double down on the rules that we know limit corporate power. We need to get more serious about establishing good and effective governance on all the issues we lost track of while we were becoming obsessed with A.I., China and the fights picked among robber barons.
  • By analogy to the health care sector, we need an A.I. public option to truly keep A.I. companies in check. A publicly directed A.I. development project would serve to counterbalance for-profit corporate A.I. and help ensure an even playing field for access to the 21st century’s key technology while offering a platform for the ethical development and use of A.I.
  • Also, we should embrace the humanity behind A.I. We can hold founders and corporations accountable by mandating greater A.I. transparency in the development stage, in addition to applying legal standards for actions associated with A.I. Remarkably, this is something that both the left and the right can agree on.
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