"Donald Trump is not an interruption of the American story; he is one of its clearest chapters. He condenses habits that long predate him—mythmaking, extraction, spectacle, racial hierarchy, masculine anxiety—into a single, gaudy figure. To look at him carefully is to see the civilisation that made him."

https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/the-mirror-cracks

🔗 Originally posted on LinkedIn

Seeing social media as a denial-of-service attack on your mind. It makes a ton of sense.

”My argument is that the current structure of public conversation has the same effect on human cognition that a botnet has on a web server. It's simply exhausting you. And an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.”

”What I do know is that the feeling of being overwhelmed, of never being able to keep up, of having strong opinions about everything and confident understanding of nothing, is not a personal failing. It's a predictable response to an impossible situation. Your brain is being DDoS'd, and the fact that you're struggling to think clearly under that onslaught is evidence that your brain is working normally. The servers aren't broken. They're overloaded. And until we figure out how to reduce the load or increase the bandwidth, the best any of us can do is recognize what's happening and try, when possible, to step away from the flood long enough to do some actual thinking.

”Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you while you spend weeks or months actually understanding something. Read books about it, not takes. Talk to experts, not pundits. Follow the evidence where it leads, even when it's uncomfortable. Change your mind when you find you were wrong. And when you finally have something to say, something you've actually earned through careful thought rather than absorbed from the tribal zeitgeist, say it clearly and then step back.”

”This won't fix the collective problem. But it will fix something in you.”

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-discourse-is-a-distributed-denial-of-service-attack/

🔗 Originally posted on LinkedIn

Today it’s four years since I presented at Raoul Wallenberg Institute on AI and Human Rights. Four years later my messaging is the same.

”To our huge disadvantage is the growing illusion of autonomy, and the invisibility of AI.”

”And core to the huge challenge of reasoning around accountability is the number of actors involved in realizing AI.”

”AI researcher Madelene Clare Elish has named this the moral crumple zone. The moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator.”

”While China is arguably a human rights menace, we have to be wary of continually pointing to their worst examples as the examples of what to avoid. Those worst examples are getting worse with time, and if we stay the same distance away from them, our human rights missteps are progressively getting worse as well. We need to NOT compare ourselves with China, but to actively proclaim where we draw the line and how we ensure we do not cross it.”

”We have a technology in the hands of a few, born in societies of abundance, and powerful enough to shape the outcome of lives across the planet.

This asymmetry of knowledge and power is a core challenge for human rights. An algorithm that is oppressive, racist, bigoted, misogynous and unfair can be all those things more efficiently than any human.”

”We are creating a more efficient version of the past instead of reimagining the future we want. There is something to be said for human inefficiency, the ability to pause and reflect, taking time to question and taking time to listen. Do we want to allow AI to erase the language, alphabets, culture and stories of poorer countries?

Missing today are the real voices. The voices of the people who are closest to the true problems. People like Peter the maize farmer in Mozambique. The voices of the people living the struggles of being overlooked and excluded, the struggles that we are responsible for creating. Who were warning us of harms long before white academics acknowledged them. If we aren’t working together with them, we are yet again colonizing, occupying and deleting.”

https://axbom.com/aihr/

🔗 Originally posted on LinkedIn