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Javier E

In defense of science fiction - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views

www.noahpinion.blog/...in-defense-of-science-fiction

science fiction dystopia effects billionaire

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I’m a big fan of science fiction (see my list of favorites from last week)! So when people start bashing the genre, I tend to leap to its defense
  • this time, the people doing the bashing are some serious heavyweights themselves — Charles Stross, the celebrated award-winning sci-fi author, and Tyler Austin Harper, a professor who studies science fiction for a living
  • The two critiques center around the same idea — that rich people have misused sci-fi, taking inspiration from dystopian stories and working to make those dystopias a reality.
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  • [Science fiction’s influence]…leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals…[T]he billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat.
  • t even then it would be hard to argue exogeneity, since censorship is a response to society’s values as well as a potential cause of them.
  • Stross is alleging that the billionaires are getting Gernsback and Campbell’s intentions exactly right. His problem is simply that Gernsback and Campbell were kind of right-wing, at least by modern standards, and he’s worried that their sci-fi acted as propaganda for right-wing ideas.
  • The question of whether literature has a political effect is an empirical one — and it’s a very difficult empirical one. It’s extremely hard to test the hypothesis that literature exerts a diffuse influence on the values and preconceptions of the citizenry
  • I think Stross really doesn’t come up with any credible examples of billionaires mistaking cautionary tales for road maps. Instead, most of his article focuses on a very different critique — the idea that sci-fi authors inculcate rich technologists with bad values and bad visions of what the future ought to look like:
  • I agree that the internet and cell phones have had an ambiguous overall impact on human welfare. If modern technology does have a Torment Nexus, it’s the mobile-social nexus that keeps us riveted to highly artificial, attenuated parasocial interactions for every waking hour of our day. But these technologies are still very young, and it remains to be seen whether the ways in which we use them will get better or worse over time.
  • There are very few technologies — if any — whose impact we can project into the far future at the moment of their inception. So unless you think our species should just refuse to create any new technology at all, you have to accept that each one is going to be a bit of a gamble.
  • As for weapons of war, those are clearly bad in terms of their direct effects on the people on the receiving end. But it’s possible that more powerful weapons — such as the atomic bomb — serve to deter more deaths than they cause
  • yes, AI is risky, but the need to manage and limit risk is a far cry from the litany of negative assumptions and extrapolations that often gets flung in the technology’s directio
  • I think the main problem with Harper’s argument is simply techno-pessimism. So far, technology’s effects on humanity have been mostly good, lifting us up from the muck of desperate poverty and enabling the creation of a healthier, more peaceful, more humane world. Any serious discussion of the effects of innovation on society must acknowledge that. We might have hit an inflection point where it all goes downhill from here, and future technologies become the Torment Nexuses that we’ve successfully avoided in the past. But it’s very premature to assume we’ve hit that point.
  • I understand that the 2020s are an exhausted age, in which we’re still reeling from the social ructions of the 2010s. I understand that in such a weary and fearful condition, it’s natural to want to slow the march of technological progress as a proxy for slowing the headlong rush of social progress
  • And I also understand how easy it is to get negatively polarized against billionaires, and any technologies that billionaires invent, and any literature that billionaires like to read.
  • But at a time when we’re creating vaccines against cancer and abundant clean energy and any number of other life-improving and productivity-boosting marvels, it’s a little strange to think that technology is ruining the world
  • The dystopian elements of modern life are mostly just prosaic, old things — political demagogues, sclerotic industries, social divisions, monopoly power, environmental damage, school bullies, crime, opiates, and so on
Javier E

Best of 2023: The Decadent Opulence of Modern Capitalism - 0 views

www.tracinskiletter.com/...-of-2023-the-decadent-opulence

opulence capitalism modern economics US income class middle-class

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • while we tend to focus on stories about everything that has gone wrong, in the long run, the bigger news always ends up being the impact of growth and innovation. But because we’re so pre-occupied with everything else, it tends to sneak up on us.
  • In the left’s view, market crashes and recessions reveal the real essence of the capitalist system. In reality, they are just temporary glitches and setbacks in a larger story of persistent innovation and growth.
  • new figures showing the widening gap in wealth between the US and Europe. Jim Pethokoukis describes it as a Doom Loop of Decline and attributes it partly to the impact of heavy European regulation.
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  • The basic driver is this: “Europe has an aging population that values its free time and social benefits over work and productivity. (This reduces labor force participation, innovation potential, and the economic growth of the continent.)
  • The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the US, according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi
  • If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today
  • even in Smith’s figures, there is no Northern European economy that outperforms the US.
  • The US economy has grown 82% in fifteen years! Barring anything more than a mild recession, that means that we can expect the US economy to more than double by the time we hit 20 years from 2008. Isn’t that wonderful?
  • It’s not just a case of doubling the overall size of the economy. The increase in wealth has been widely distributed.
  • I was struck by a calculation by George Washington University’s Stephen Rose that he describes at a center-left newsletter called The Liberal Patriot
  • Deciding what is “middle class” versus “lower middle class” versus “upper middle class” is difficult, and every analysis sets up different cutoffs between these categories. But Rose sets a reasonable level, describing “upper middle class” as an income between $100,000 and $350,000
  • Using this measure, there was real growth in every rung of the economic ladder over the period from 1979 to 2019, with each ascending step having slightly higher percentage gain….
  • In brief, economic growth from 1979 to 2019 led more of the population to move up to higher social classes. As Table 1 shows, the bottom two categories—poor and near-poor plus lower middle class—went from a combined 49 percent to 29 percent
  • The size of the [core middle class] also declined, down from 39 percent to 31 percent over these years
  • These declines manifest themselves in a massive—and massively under-covered—growth of the [upper middle class], spiking from 13 percent in 1979 to 37 percent in 2019.
  • America has always thought of itself as a middle-class country. But we are rapidly becoming an upper-middle-class country
  • This is now the largest category, and at the rate we’re going, it will soon be an outright majority.
  • upper-middle-class people can afford more welfare-state spending, and they also have more access to education and, frankly, the luxury of agonizing over something other than our pocketbooks. It has been a long time since most Americans were concerned about how to put a roof over our heads, so we have moved on from “kitchen table” issues to concerns about values and status and self-image.
  • in this context, the Old Left welfare-state programs look, not merely unnecessary, but callous and cruel
  • the incentives created by welfare programs discourage work for the poor. But in a growing and thriving upper-middle-class country, this looks like a way to create a permanent underclass who are kept in poverty so we can congratulate ourselves on our compassion and generosity
  • some of this may also explain the right’s belligerent opposition to immigration. If we are becoming an upper-middle-class country, perhaps we are taking on some of the attitudes of a gated community that wants to keep out the riff-raff.
Javier E

Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek? - by Bill Coberly - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...-all-too-cynical-for-star-trek

science fiction trek utopia values TV culture history

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF WE CAN’T even trust the institutions in our imagined utopias?
  • Starfleet’s exact role was left intentionally vague in the original series (1966–69); the writer’s guide for the original Star Trek explicitly encourages writers to “stay away from it as much as possible,” partly to avoid getting into the details of Earth’s future politics. But by the time of Star Trek’s heyday in the mid-1990s, Starfleet was established as an elite institution composed of brilliant and dedicated people (human and otherwise) who served in an organization resembling NASA, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Department of State all bundled together, with all of the opportunities for incoherence and mission creep that jumble implies.
  • One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.
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  • the characters in the core three modern shows—Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—are less concerned with professionalism and duty and more concerned with personal morality, authenticity, and teamwork.
  • Dylan Roth, writing for Fanbyte, suggested that as Star Trek has aged, it has “changed from a series about benign authority to one about stalwart heroes protecting an institution from moral decay.” This is true enough, but I also think there’s something else going on with the modern Trek shows. Namely, the atmosphere and philosophy of the shows is much less comfortable with the maxims of professionalism and duty that were foundational to pre-2017 Star Trek media.
  • Modern Star Trek, much like older Star Trek, often presents its main characters as moral paragons, but whereas older Trek would usually depict them embodying Starfleet’s ideals in the presence of challenging aliens, modern Trek is more likely to establish their uprightness by contrast with the faceless and untrustworthy institution of Starfleet itself. Both eras do both things, at least occasionally, but the ratio has notably shifted.
  • WHY THE CHANGE? Part of it probably has to do with the other material that Star Trek writers are drawing from. The ’60s and ’90s-era Trek writers either served in the military themselves or were drawing from science fiction written by people who had. (Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and many of the great science-fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Walter M. Miller Jr., each served in some capacity in the World War II-era U.S. or British armed forces.
  • difference in leadership style is everywhere between the two eras. The Strange New Worlds version of Capt. Christopher Pike has been repeatedly praised for being more collaborative than commanding (I struggle to remember a time he has ever raised his voice), whereas Capt. Sisko shouts at everyone, as only the great Avery Brooks can shout. Picard’s version of its title character trades all his twentieth-century grouchy gravitas for a more grandfatherly role; his inspirational speeches now seek to buoy his friends’ confidence rather than inspire subordinates to high achievement.
  • Old-school Sisko reminds his crew of the expectations he has for them and unsubtly critiques their behavior as unbecoming of Starfleet officers. He acknowledges their difficulties (“I know it’s hot. . .”), but leaves no doubt that he expects them to perform their duties as professionals anyway. New-school Tilly motivates her command by making it clear that she sees and hears their concerns, and encourages them to work together by seeing the value in their unique life experiences.
  • modern Trek writers are far less likely to have served—but are far more likely to have worked in twenty-first-century corporate America, which has a rather different set of norms and concepts of professionalism.
  • more fundamentally, popular science fiction today—as written by authors like N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, and Tamsyn Muir—is more likely to be concerned with questions of identity and combating imperialism. It is also more likely to be written from marginalized perspectives, which have valid reasons to distrust institutions and authority. For many of these writers, concepts like “professionalism” have questionable implications
  • Besides, nobody likes any of America’s institutions anymore (and for all that Star Trek is ostensibly international, it is a fundamentally American franchise). Gallup’s polling about Americans’ faith in U.S. institutions shows it hovering at or near record-breaking lows, spawning a great deal of hand-wringing from people across the political spectrum. These apparently untrustworthy institutions range from purely political ones (the presidency, the Supreme Court, etc.) to “the church or organized religion” (whatever that means), “banks,” and “newspapers.”
  • What are professionalism and duty if not the suppression of individual quirks in service of some larger goal or institution? Duty overrides individual desires or assessments of right and wrong.
  • But older Trek nevertheless believed in duty, because it believed that Starfleet was a fundamentally good institution, even if it may be failed by individual bad or misguided actors. It elevated Starfleet’s regulations and codes of conduct almost to the status of holy wri
  • it is difficult to be seriously inspired by the notion of duties if one has a deep distrust of the institutions that assign such duties.
  • Of course the characters written by twenty-first-century authors, who are animated by the same deep distrust of American institutions as the rest of us, are less likely to justify themselves with the language of duty than they are by reference to personal morality and authenticity. And of course they’re going to be skeptical of rank and hierarchy because they don’t believe these things are necessarily signs of actual merit or accomplishment any more than the rest of us do.
  • Yet I worry. If Star Trek is supposed to start from the assumption that Starfleet and the Federation are quasi-utopian, I worry about what it says about our collective imaginations if we can’t even let the institutions of that fictional utopia be utopian. If we can’t even trust Starfleet, who can we trust?
Javier E

Opinion | The Question of Transgender Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsgender-care-cass-report.html

epistemic bubble evidence ethic belief trans debate humility

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.
  • Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
  • Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being
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  • a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.
  • As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
  • The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.
  • he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”
  • Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.
  • In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.
  • “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote
  • A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
  • Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence
  • her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.
  • She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.
Javier E

German living standards plummeted after Russia invaded Ukraine, say economists | German... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...invaded-ukraine-say-economists

Germany economy 2023 ukraine war russia

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The energy shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest collapse in German living standards since the second world war and a downturn in economic output comparable to the 2008 financial crisis, a stark assessment has found.
  • real wages in the country slumped further in 2022 than in any year since 1950.
  • A failure to protect German industry from the energy price spike may turn the 2020s into “a lost decade for Germany” and further fuel the rise of the populist far-right Alternative für De
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  • “In an age of conflict, climate and geopolitical crisis the rise of the AfD is a wake-up call. The collapse in living standards experienced by Germans is unprecedented since world war two. While it is true that the factors that fuelled the rise of the AfD go beyond economics, it is also impossible to ignore how this unprecedented slump in German living went hand-in-hand with the rising popularity of the far right.”
  • Europe’s largest economy is still reeling from the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The International Monetary Fund forecast for German growth in 2024 and 2025 is that it will be lower than any comparable advanced economy save Argentina.
  • Weber and Krebs highlighted that two distinct surges in support for the AfD in the summers of 2022 and 2023 coincide with periods of uncertainty in the German government about how to address the impact of energy price shocks on living standards.
  • Once the damage to output caused by the Covid crisis is included, actual output at the end of 2023 was about 7% below the pre-crisis trend. Real wages were 10% below their pre-crisis trend in 2023.
Javier E

'The machine did it coldly': Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets | Israel-G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

israel hamas war proportionality bomb targets

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
  • The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.
  • Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.
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  • Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
  • “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for an attack.
  • “Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care – you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
  • ccording to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the homes of thousands of Palestinians who were linked, with the assistance of AI, to militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war.
  • Details about the specific kinds of data used to train Lavender’s algorithm, or how the programme reached its conclusions, are not included in the accounts published by +972 or Local Call. However, the sources said that during the first few weeks of the war, Unit 8200 refined Lavender’s algorithm and tweaked its search parameters.
  • Responding to the publication of the testimonies in +972 and Local Call, the IDF said in a statement that its operations were carried out in accordance with the rules of proportionality under international law. It said dumb bombs are “standard weaponry” that are used by IDF pilots in a manner that ensures “a high level of precision”.
  • “The IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” it added. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”
  • In earlier military operations conducted by the IDF, producing human targets was often a more labour-intensive process. Multiple sources who described target development in previous wars to the Guardian, said the decision to “incriminate” an individual, or identify them as a legitimate target, would be discussed and then signed off by a legal adviser.
  • n the weeks and months after 7 October, this model for approving strikes on human targets was dramatically accelerated, according to the sources. As the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza intensified, they said, commanders demanded a continuous pipeline of targets.
  • “We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us,” said one intelligence officer. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”
  • Lavender was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence division, Unit 8200, which is comparable to the US’s National Security Agency or GCHQ in the UK.
  • After randomly sampling and cross-checking its predictions, the unit concluded Lavender had achieved a 90% accuracy rate, the sources said, leading the IDF to approve its sweeping use as a target recommendation tool.
  • Lavender created a database of tens of thousands of individuals who were marked as predominantly low-ranking members of Hamas’s military wing, they added. This was used alongside another AI-based decision support system, called the Gospel, which recommended buildings and structures as targets rather than individuals.
  • The accounts include first-hand testimony of how intelligence officers worked with Lavender and how the reach of its dragnet could be adjusted. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” one of the sources said. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is.”
  • broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
  • Before the war, US and Israeli estimated membership of Hamas’s military wing at approximately 25-30,000 people.
  • there was a decision to treat Palestinian men linked to Hamas’s military wing as potential targets, regardless of their rank or importance.
  • According to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,” one source said.
  • Another source, who justified the use of Lavender to help identify low-ranking targets, said that “when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it”. They said that in wartime there was insufficient time to carefully “incriminate every target”
  • So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it,” they added.
  • When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
  • Such a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied according to the seniority of the target.
  • The IDF’s targeting processes in the most intensive phase of the bombardment were also relaxed, they said. “There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations,” one source said. “A policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge.”
  • “There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” another added. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.” There appears to have been significant fluctuations in the figure that military commanders would tolerate at different stages of the war
  • One source said that the limit on permitted civilian casualties “went up and down” over time, and at one point was as low as five. During the first week of the conflict, the source said, permission was given to kill 15 non-combatants to take out junior militants in Gaza
  • at one stage earlier in the war they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age.
  • “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” they said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’ … In practice, the proportionality criterion did not exist.”
  • Experts in international humanitarian law who spoke to the Guardian expressed alarm at accounts of the IDF accepting and pre-authorising collateral damage ratios as high as 20 civilians, particularly for lower-ranking militants. They said militaries must assess proportionality for each individual strike.
  • An international law expert at the US state department said they had “never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. There’s a lot of leeway, but that strikes me as extreme”.
  • Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Department of Defense, now an analyst at Crisis Group, said: “While there may be certain occasions where 15 collateral civilian deaths could be proportionate, there are other times where it definitely wouldn’t be. You can’t just set a tolerable number for a category of targets and say that it’ll be lawfully proportionate in each case.”
  • Whatever the legal or moral justification for Israel’s bombing strategy, some of its intelligence officers appear now to be questioning the approach set by their commanders. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza,” one said.
  • Another said that after the 7 October attacks by Hamas, the atmosphere in the IDF was “painful and vindictive”. “There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough. On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”
Javier E

Chocolate Might Never Be the Same - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678053

chocolate culture crisis history economics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”
  • The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,
  • Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.
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  • Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.
  • ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.
  • Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.
  • Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown
  • Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,
  • Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.
  • No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.
  • So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.
Javier E

Opinion | America's Irrational Macreconomic Freak Out - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntiment-inflation-anxiety.html

bias perception economic cognitive bias psychology brain science

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.
  • It follows that the typical worker can now afford two percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades.
  • many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.
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  • That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.
  • In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.
  • Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.
  • younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.
  • Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.
  • But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment
  • Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.
  • The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.
  • in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.
  • While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.
  • Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.
  • More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.
  • in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history
  • And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.
  • The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.
  • Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.
Javier E

Fake News: It's as American as George Washington's Cherry Tree - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-how-america-went-haywire.html

fantasy individualism culture crisis politics history

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • What happens next in American history, according to Andersen, happens without malevolence, or even intention. Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm.
  • Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths. The 1800s see an explosion of water cures and homeopathy and something called mesmerism,
  • Cody was in this way the father of Hollywood, the industry that did the most, Andersen says, to break down the mental barriers between the real and unreal.
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  • In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares.
  • After the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories become not just a fringe hobby but a “permanent feature of the American mental landscape.” U.F.O. sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate
  • In the meantime, a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not gray or white. And apparently there were only eight plastic surgeons in all of Manhattan. But the market for hair color and plastic surgery explodes, as America starts writing its “national fiction of permanent youthfulness.”
  • the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago
  • Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the ’60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” Or put more simply: You do you.
  • If there’s a flaw in this book, it’s repetitiveness. Andersen seems by nature a collector. He goes for wide rather than deep. So he doesn’t examine, for example, how we would separate the junk from the gems
  • What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, preached by someone with the fire of Anne Hutchinson. A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality.
  • our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavor: propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.
  • In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West: She was, he writes, uniquely American “because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality,” a total stranger to self-doubt.
  • As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.”
Javier E

I tried out an Apple Vision Pro. It frightened me | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...le-vision-pro-it-frightened-me

AI immersive passthrough culture crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is the immersive video
  • Watching a movie, however, feels like you’ve been transported into the content.
  • that raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate to rush this technology out but it’s not clear how much they’ve been worrying about the consequences.
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  • it is clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology seamlessly blur
  • Over the years there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metaverse: an experience that feels scarily real because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to a point that they are almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between online assault and an attack in real life?
  • more broadly, spatial computing is going to alter what we consider reality
  • Researchers from Stanford and Michigan University recently undertook a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature which brings VR content into your real-world surrounding so you see what’s around you while using the device) and emerged with some stark warnings about how this tech might rewire our brains and “interfere with social connection”.
  • These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.
  • “What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,”
  • “People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.”
  • It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might be altered that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how much influence big tech already has when it comes to content we see, and then multiply that a million times over. You think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they seem even more realistic.
  • We’re seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful this sort of technology is going to massively accelerate it.
  • Being able to suck people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s an authoritarian’s dream. We’re entering an age where people can be mollified and manipulated like never before
Javier E

Immigration powered the economy, job market amid border negotiations - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...onomy-immigration-border-biden

immigration economy pandemic policy US politics history economics

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented versus undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared to previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.
  • immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come.
  • The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.
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  • Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration
  • The sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.
  • he flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions designed to restrict migration.
  • Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of 2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million
  • But the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden, widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.
  • economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.
  • That’s because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take over child care or avoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely
  • In the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose at the fastest pace.
  • About the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.
  • Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023
  • But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire.
  • lus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force,
  • “What it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason why wages don’t go down.”
  • In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.
  • Particularly for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.
  • “More than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the day.”
  • Upon arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January, Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories manufacturer making $20 an hour.
  • But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.
  • Federal law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional months because of a backlog in cases.
  • While they wait, many migrants find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.
  • Still, many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries where they are susceptible to exploitation.
Javier E

Opinion | The Mystery of White Rural Rage - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...white-rural-voters.html

white rural voters economics economy US crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.
  • It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.
  • This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
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  • “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.
  • Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides
  • Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.
  • The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.
  • Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have
  • But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.
  • So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.
  • While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs.
  • And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.
  • This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Al
  • In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.
  • Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.
  • Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.
  • Draw attention to some of these realities and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist
  • The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.
  • while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.
Javier E

Inside the porn industry, AI looms large - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ai-porn-avn-industry

porn ai transformation disruption culture

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Since the first AVN “expo” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate.
  • Now, a new shift is on the horizon: Artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.
  • Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.
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  • he trickiest question may be how to prevent abuse. AI generators have technological boundaries, but not morals, and it’s relatively easy for users to trick them into creating content that depicts violence, rape, sex with children or a celebrity — or even a crush from work who never consented to appear
  • In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no federal laws protect the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes.
  • Adult entertainment is a giant industry accounting for a substantial chunk of all internet traffic: Major porn sites get more monthly visitors and page views than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or Zoom
  • The industry is a habitual early adopter of new technology, from VHS to DVD to dot com. In the mid-2000s, porn companies set up massive sites where users upload and watch free videos, and ad sales foot the bills.
  • At last year’s AVN conference, Steven Jones said his peers looked at him “like he was crazy” when he talked about AI opportunities: “Nobody was interested.” This year, Jones said, he’s been “the belle of the ball.”
  • He called up his old business partner, and the two immediately spent about $550,000 securing the web domains for porn dot ai, deepfake dot com and deepfakes dot com, Jones said. “Lightspeed” was back.
  • One major model, Stable Diffusion, shares its code publicly, and some technologists have figured out how to edit the code to allow for sexual images
  • What keeps Jones up at night is people trying to use his company’s tools to generate images of abuse, he said. The models have some technological guardrails that make it difficult for users to render children, celebrities or acts of violence. But people are constantly looking for workarounds.
  • So with help from an angel investor he will not name, Jones hired five employees and a handful of offshore contractors and started building an image engine trained on bundles of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude photos from Jones’s own collection
  • Users create what Jones calls a “dream girl,” prompting the AI with descriptions of the character’s appearance, pose and setting. The nudes don’t portray real people, he said. Rather, the goal is to re-create a fantasy from the user’s imagination.
  • The AI-generated images got better, their computerized sheen growing steadily less noticeable. Jones grew his user base to 500,000 people, many of whom pay to generate more images than the five per day allotted to free accounts, he said. The site’s “power users” generate AI porn for 10 hours a day, he said.
  • Jones described the site as an “artists’ community” where people can explore their sexualities and fantasies in a safe space. Unlike some corners of the traditional adult industry, no performers are being pressured, underpaid or placed in harm’s way
  • And critically, consumers don’t have to wait for their favorite OnlyFans performer to come online or trawl through Pornhub to find the content they like.
  • Next comes AI-generated video — “porn’s holy grail,” Jones said. Eventually, he sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike automated “performers.” Within two years, he said, there will be “fully AI cam girls,” a reference to creators who make solo sex content.
  • It costs $12 per day to rent a server from Amazon Web Services, he said, and generating a single picture requires users to have access to a corresponding server. His users have so far generated more than 1.6 million images.
  • Copyright holders including newspapers, photographers and artists have filed a slew of lawsuits against AI companies, claiming the companies trained their models on copyrighted content. If plaintiffs win, it could cut off the free-for-all that benefits entrepreneurs such as Jones.
  • But Jones’s plan to create consumer-friendly AI porn engines faced significant obstacles. The companies behind major image-generation models used technical boundaries to block “not safe for work” content and, without racy images to learn from, the models weren’t good at re-creating nude bodies or scenes.
  • Jones said his team takes down images that other users flag as abusive. Their list of blocked prompts currently contains 1,000 terms including “high school.”
  • “I see certain things people type in, and I just hope to God they’re trying to test the model, like we are. I hope they don’t actually want to see the things they’re typing in.
  • Peter Acworth, the owner of kink dot com, is trying to teach an AI porn generator to understand even subtler concepts, such as the difference between torture and consensual sexual bondage. For decades Acworth has pushed for spaces — in the real world and online — for consenting adults to explore nonconventional sexual interests. In 2006, he bought the San Francisco Armory, a castle-like building in the city’s Mission neighborhood, and turned it into a studio where his company filmed fetish porn until shuttering in 2017.
  • Now, Acworth is working with engineers to train an image-generation model on pictures of BDSM, an acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
  • Others alluded to a porn apocalypse, with AI wiping out existing models of adult entertainment.“Look around,” said Christian Burke, head of engineering at the adult-industry payment app Melon, gesturing at performers huddled, laughing and hugging across the show floor. “This could look entirely different in a few years.”
  • But the age of AI brings few guarantees for the people, largely women, who appear in porn. Many have signed broad contracts granting companies the rights to reproduce their likeness in any medium for the rest of time
  • Not only could performers lose income, Walters said, they could find themselves in offensive or abusive scenes they never consented to.
  • Lana Smalls, a 23-year-old performer whose videos have been viewed 20 million times on Pornhub, said she’s had colleagues show up to shoots with major studios only to be surprised by sweeping AI clauses in their contracts.
  • “This industry is too fragmented for collective bargaining,” Spiegler said. “Plus, this industry doesn’t like rules.”
Javier E

'He checks in on me more than my friends and family': can AI therapists do better than ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-do-better-than-the-real-thing

AI therapy chatbot psychology emotions culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.
  • Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.
  • ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece
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  • The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.
  • AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”
  • AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.
  • Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.
  • n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.
  • One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.
  • erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.
  • “There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).
  • A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.
  • Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”
  • Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”
  • Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”
  • One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)
  • AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.
  • Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.
  • With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.
  • Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”
  • His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”
  • Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.
  • Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.
  • Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”
  • Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”
  • A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.
  • Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.
  • Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.
  • ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load
  • We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”
  • Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits
  • But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.
  • n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.
  • Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.
  • ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”
Javier E

Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677364

Stephenson science fiction prediction ai learning

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Think about any concept that we might want to teach somebody—for instance, the Pythagorean theorem. There must be thousands of old and new explanations of the Pythagorean theorem online. The real thing we need is to understand each child’s learning style so we can immediately connect them to the one out of those thousands that is the best fit for how they learn. That to me sounds like an AI kind of project, but it’s a different kind of AI application from DALL-E or large language models.
  • Right now a lot of generative AI is free, but the technology is also very expensive to run. How do you think access to generative AI might play out?
  • Stephenson: There was a bit of early internet utopianism in the book, which was written during that era in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming online. There was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it
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  • It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok
  • A chatbot is not an oracle; it’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate. Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society
  • We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI. I think a lot of the ferment that’s happening right now in the industry is venture capitalists putting money into business plans, and teams that are rapidly evaluating a whole lot of different things that could be done well. I’m sure that some things are going to emerge that I wouldn’t dare try to predict, because the results of the creative frenzy of millions of people is always more interesting than what a single person can think of.
Javier E

Dave Ramsey Tells Millions What to Do With Their Money. People Under 40 Say He's Wrong.... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...nder-40-say-hes-wrong-56733630

financial advice advisor austerity discipline Gen Z money learning trends culture

shared by Javier E on 19 May 24 - No Cached
  • Ramsey, the well-known and intensely followed 63-year-old conservative Christian radio host, has 4.4 million Instagram followers, 1.9 million TikTok followers and legions more who listen to his radio shows and podcasts.
  • His message is brutal and direct: Avoid debt at all costs. Pay for everything in cash. Embrace frugality.
  • Plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are pushing back, largely on TikTok. The hashtag #daveramseywouldntapprove, for instance, has 66.8 million views. Many say they don’t want to eat rice and beans every night—a popular Ramsey trope—or hold down multiple jobs to pay off loans. They also say Ramsey is out of touch with their reality.
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  • Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.
  • home prices have risen considerably, while wages haven’t kept pace.
  • “What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a
  • She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S
  • he feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice.
  • When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.
  • “Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.
  • Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.
  • People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.
  • She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.
  • “That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.
  • Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes. 
  • Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.
  • Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.
  • Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.
  • She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.
Javier E

Opinion | Jan. 6, America's Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...emory-memorial-forgetting.html

oblivion forgetting public accountability responsibility memory

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • This is not the first time our nation has survived a profound internal rupture, but it may be the first time in which the political ringleaders of the revolt may very well escape much accountability while hundreds of their followers serve jail time.
  • In previous times of national crisis, the same spirit of mercy that Mr. Biden conjured generally applied to lower-level offenders, while those who had committed the worst crimes were the first to be arrested and tried for their treasonous acts.
  • As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come. It did not always achieve its lofty aspirations, nor was it appropriate for all conflicts. But the ideals it grasped for had an enduring appeal.
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  • After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.
  • The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.
  • the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault
  • Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.
  • For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm
  • Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office
  • I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.
  • Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don
  • consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.
  • over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.
  • The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.
  • The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”
  • In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War
  • To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism
  • the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.
  • Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.
  • This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.
  • Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us
  • we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance
  • Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need
  • our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.
  • Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.
  • The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.
  • Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.
Javier E

The Influencer Is a Young Teenage Girl. The Audience Is 92% Adult Men. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ram-meta-safety-risks-6d27497e

teenage meta exploitation pedophile girl culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.
  • That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 
  • Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   
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  • One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”
  • Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations. 
  • Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies. 
  • Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate. 
  • Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.
  • Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live. 
  • The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers. 
  • Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.
  • While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. 
  • Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.
  • The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.
  • The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why. 
  • “There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”
  • The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said. 
  • Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.
  • he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.
  • The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.
  • an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.
  • Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”
  • Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.
  • The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel. 
  • The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.
  • In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines. 
  • The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.
  • In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.
  • The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.
  • The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how. 
  • Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts. 
Javier E

Abortion Rights Debate Shifts to Pregnancy and Fertility as Election Nears - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ortion-roe-wade-pregnancy.html

abortion rights debate pregnancy fertility

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?
  • That shift helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion rights — especially among Black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29. Republican women are increasingly saying their party’s opposition to abortion is too extreme, and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.
  • Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for 25 years, estimated that before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, less than 15 percent of the public considered abortion personally relevant — women who could get pregnant and would choose an abortion.
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  • “People used to talk about politicians trying to control our bodies,” she said. “Now it’s, they have no business getting involved in these medical decisions, these politicians don’t have medical expertise, they’re making these laws, and they’re not basing it on health care or science.”
  • Seventy-three percent of independents who support abortion rights said stories about women almost dying because of bans would affect how they vote.
  • “Now it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant,” she said. “It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”
  • Anti-abortion groups have responded by trying to carve out a difference between “elective abortion” for unwanted pregnancies — which they want banned — and “maternal fetal separation” in medical emergencies. (The medical procedure is the same.)
  • Opponents have long stigmatized abortion as something irresponsible women use as birth control or because they care more about their careers than having children. “When the focus shifts to the dangers that abortion bans inflict on pregnant people,” said Reva Siegel, a constitutional law professor at Yale who has written extensively about the country’s abortion conflict, “it’s easier for Americans to talk about.”
  • Technology and criminal law have flipped the script, she said.
  • Before Roe legalized abortion nationally in 1973, the law allowed more leeway for what were considered “therapeutic abortions.” Doctors, often solo practitioners, could use their good faith judgment to provide them. Even the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortions in cases of fetal deformity or when a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk.
  • Now, the threat of prosecution, $100,000 fines and loss of their medical licenses have chilled doctors and hospital systems in treating women with pregnancy complications. More often than not in some states, lawyers are making the decisions.
  • In Georgia, she said, more people opposed the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy once they were told that this meant two weeks after the average woman misses her period — not, as her own partner believed, six weeks after conception. Some voters, she said, believed that six weeks meant six weeks after women found out they were pregnant.
Javier E

AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: 'We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-ai-the-singularity-is-nearer

ai kurzweil predictions evaluation 2024

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • American computer scientist and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil is a long-serving authority on artificial intelligence (AI). His bestselling 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, sparked imaginations with sci-fi like predictions that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029 and that we would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045, which he called “the Singularity”. Now, nearly 20 years on, Kurzweil, 76, has a sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer
  • no longer seem so wacky.
  • Your 2029 and 2045 projections haven’t changed…I have stayed consistent. So 2029, both for human-level intelligence and for artificial general intelligence (AGI) – which is a little bit different. Human-level intelligence generally means AI that has reached the ability of the most skilled humans in a particular domain and by 2029 that will be achieved in most respects. (There may be a few years of transition beyond 2029 where AI has not surpassed the top humans in a few key skills like writing Oscar-winning screenplays or generating deep new philosophical insights, though it will.) AGI means AI that can do everything that any human can do, but to a superior level. AGI sounds more difficult, but it’s coming at the same time.
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  • Why write this book? The Singularity Is Near talked about the future, but 20 years ago, when people didn’t know what AI was. It was clear to me what would happen, but it wasn’t clear to everybody. Now AI is dominating the conversation. It is time to take a look again both at the progress we’ve made – large language models (LLMs) are quite delightful to use – and the coming breakthroughs.
  • It is hard to imagine what this would be like, but it doesn’t sound very appealing… Think of it like having your phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question your brain will be able to go out to the cloud for an answer similar to the way you do on your phone now – only it will be instant, there won’t be any input or output issues, and you won’t realise it has been done (the answer will just appear). People do say “I don’t want that”: they thought they didn’t want phones either!
  • The most important driver is the exponential growth in the amount of computing power for the price in constant dollars. We are doubling price-performance every 15 months. LLMs just began to work two years ago because of the increase in computation.
  • What’s missing currently to bring AI to where you are predicting it will be in 2029? One is more computing power – and that’s coming. That will enable improvements in contextual memory, common sense reasoning and social interaction, which are all areas where deficiencies remain
  • LLM hallucinations [where they create nonsensical or inaccurate outputs] will become much less of a problem, certainly by 2029 – they already happen much less than they did two years ago. The issue occurs because they don’t have the answer, and they don’t know that. They look for the best thing, which might be wrong or not appropriate. As AI gets smarter, it will be able to understand its own knowledge more precisely and accurately report to humans when it doesn’t know.
  • What exactly is the Singularity? Today, we have one brain size which we can’t go beyond to get smarter. But the cloud is getting smarter and it is growing really without bounds. The Singularity, which is a metaphor borrowed from physics, will occur when we merge our brain with the cloud. We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots – robots the size of molecules – that will go noninvasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.
  • Why should we believe your dates? I’m really the only person that predicted the tremendous AI interest that we’re seeing today. In 1999 people thought that would take a century or more. I said 30 years and look what we have.
  • I have a chapter on perils. I’ve been involved with trying to find the best way to move forward and I helped to develop the Asilomar AI Principles [a 2017 non-legally binding set of guidelines for responsible AI development]
  • All the major companies are putting more effort into making sure their systems are safe and align with human values than they are into creating new advances, which is positive.
  • Not everyone is likely to be able to afford the technology of the future you envisage. Does technological inequality worry you? Being wealthy allows you to afford these technologies at an early point, but also one where they don’t work very well. When [mobile] phones were new they were very expensive and also did a terrible job. They had access to very little information and didn’t talk to the cloud. Now they are very affordable and extremely useful. About three quarters of people in the world have one. So it’s going to be the same thing here: this issue goes away over time.
  • The book looks in detail at AI’s job-killing potential. Should we be worried? Yes, and no. Certain types of jobs will be automated and people will be affected. But new capabilities also create new jobs. A job like “social media influencer” didn’t make sense, even 10 years ago. Today we have more jobs than we’ve ever had and US average personal income per hours worked is 10 times what it was 100 years ago adjusted to today’s dollars. Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.
  • Everything is progressing exponentially: not only computing power but our understanding of biology and our ability to engineer at far smaller scales. In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through ageing we get back from scientific progress. And as we move past that we’ll actually get back more years.
  • What is your own plan for immortality? My first plan is to stay alive, therefore reaching longevity escape velocity. I take about 80 pills a day to help keep me healthy. Cryogenic freezing is the fallback. I’m also intending to create a replicant of myself [an afterlife AI avatar], which is an option I think we’ll all have in the late 2020s
  • I did something like that with my father, collecting everything that he had written in his life, and it was a little bit like talking to him. [My replicant] will be able to draw on more material and so represent my personality more faithfully.
  • What should we be doing now to best prepare for the future? It is not going to be us versus AI: AI is going inside ourselves. It will allow us to create new things that weren’t feasible before. It’ll be a pretty fantastic future.
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