Status:
Psychotherapy session today and while it wasn’t too heavy it did pretty much dominate the rest of the day. Managed to get a bit of reading done this evening but otherwise I’m not sure exactly what happened outside that hour.
Reading:
- Iason Gabriel - the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI — I sighed upon seeing this and was ready to tear to pieces but it’s a surprisingly interesting and hype-free piece. Yes, Google have hired this guy for what we might call the philosophy-washing of their corporate tech, but the guy himself seems pretty on the level with a clear sense of what his team is being asked to develop an ethical framework for. There’s also a nice history of the pre-2000 era when this stuff was bubbling up and the lines in the sand were being drawn between those who thought conscious machines were coming and those who saw the next abuse of power. Must be interesting to be sitting in the middle of all that.
- You don’t have to swallow frogs — From last September, an analysis of a conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates which is interesting for it’s look at US politics but I think is highly instructive on the way the Labour Party in the UK has tried to deal with Reform. “I believe [Klein is] in the throes of a real struggle over how to proceed. But as of right now, he’s only serving the political movement and business interests that benefit from a morally compromised, morally compromising political left. His lack of compass in this moment means that he’s being played by a system that benefits from his confusion and his willingness to spread that confusion. “
Watching:
- Stewart Lee’s record shop crawl (28:28) — This was a lot of fun. Lee goes on a bike ride around East London visiting the sort of record shops you feel mildly intimidated by. You can see him flip from imposter syndrome to hyperactive know-all nerd once he finds some weird jazz record he knows all about. Also, a surprising amount of Birmingham-specific landmarks in Hackney.
- Michael Sugrue on Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Post-structuralism (46:12) — I hadn’t heard of Sugrue and his 1992 lectures which apparently were very popular during the early pandemic. I’ve never had a good grip on Foucault beyond the very basics and (some of) this has (sort of) helped a (very little) bit.
Clicking:
- The AI Compass — I found this quiz to be much less annoying that I was expecting and the list of archetypes in the results was quite amusing. My result: “The Conscientious Objector (patron saint Holly Herndon). It doesn’t work well, it’s doing real harm, and you’ve opted out on principle. You’re not a technophobe — you just think this specific technology is overhyped and corrosive, and you’re tired of being told you just don’t understand it. You understand it fine. That’s the problem."