After software eats the world, what comes out the other end? ⊗ Building a public energy commons ⊗ Unplugging is not the solution you want

After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?

Really good piece by Henry Farrell where he explores the cultural implications of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their tendency to reproduce mainstream culture while diminishing unique and innovative contributions. He argues that rather than leading to a chaotic recursion of ideas, LLMs amplify central cultural themes, resulting in a homogenised landscape that obscures originality.

He’s largely right but perhaps a bit too cut and dry in his evaluation. What public LLMs do right now is not what all AIs do or will do. For example SLMs have different affordances, RAG can provide different tendencies by adding training on a specific corpus, and prompting can lead to different results. If you ask a good Chatbot to write in a different style (using adjectives, not to imitate specific authors) or to suggest edgier topics, it does give different results. That doesn’t make Farrell wrong, his main point is correct, but there are more diversified options.

Two other things that came to mind. One is something I often do (actually, Reader does it for me on every article), ask for a summary. Unless you ask for something specifically more precise, most summaries will just be compressions of the article. I’m usually after what’s unique, intriguing, or the points that connect to other concepts, not a scrunched up article. As in the general view above, with summaries LLMs go for the common, you have to ask for the different. Second, globally it reminds me of SEO, search queries, or Siri/Alexa. Some have said that we end up writing and speaking like machines to be more easily parsed by them. Now the machines are speaking back in average language with average ideas based on an average of what we’ve written.

“The political anthropologist James Scott has explained how bureaucracies are monsters of information, devouring rich, informal bodies of tacitly held knowledge and excreting a thin slurry of abstract categories that rulers use to “see” the world.” […]

There is good reason to believe that these models are centripetal rather than centrifugal. On average, they create representations that tug in the direction of the dense masses at the center of culture, rather than towards the sparse fringe of weirdness and surprise scattered around the periphery. […]

They will parse human culture with a lossiness that skews, so that central aspects of that culture are accentuated, and sparser aspects disappear in translation. […]

The plausible destination that LLMs conduct towards is not entropy, or at least not entropy any time soon, but a cluster of cultural strong attractors that increase conformity, and makes it much harder to find new directions and get them to stick.

Building a public energy commons

Just in case you were still thinking that the market can fix anything on its own, this piece in The Los Angeles Review of Books reviewing The Price Is Wrong (mostly) and The Fall and Rise of American Finance will rid you of that idea. Ashley Dawson shows us how investments in renewables are stalling (USA) or hard to finance (global south), not because they aren’t profitable, but because the are not profitable enough.

Through a mix of misaligned incentives, few but powerful banks, and the ever-present and reliably vampiric asset management companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, renewables are growing but fossil fuels keep getting massive investments. In other words, “bankers are consigning our world to the bonfire.”

The title was a bit deceiving, as the energy commons are just quickly dropped at the end of the piece. Perhaps because it’s based on two books where, I assume, the concept of energy commons is not covered. We end up with a useful read, for sure, but sadly one that shows why we need these commons, without giving us much of what they could be.

The main economic reason why the decarbonization of electricity is progressing so much slower than we need it to […] is that most governments worldwide have effectively outsourced responsibility for developing, owning and operating solar and wind farms to profit-oriented private sector actors, and yet the profits that such actors expect to be able to earn from investment in these activities generally underwhelm. It is simply not a sufficiently attractive economic proposition. […]

Consequently, as Christophers explains, the calculus that determines whether we stop polluting the planet is quite literally whether renewables projects are considered “bankable.” […]

We must mobilize people around the notion that clean energy infrastructure is a public good, a vital part of the commons like water and clean air, that it is a collective good that should be managed in a democratic and equitable manner. This fight for the energy commons is perhaps the great challenge of our era.

Unplugging is not the solution you want

I’m mostly in agreement with this piece by Matt Klein. He underplays the attractiveness of screens a bit, for some people, almost painting it as a decision between different practices, not a hard to drop addiction. That being said, his approach is close to what I’m doing and, in the long term, likely the only sustainable one.

Detoxes, tech sabbath days, and unplugging are not only short-term and privileged solutions, it’s hard to believe one might keep them up for years. Instead, Klein advocates for developing our ability to coexist with technology, encouraging curiosity and agency rather than evasion. He believes that embracing the challenges of our tech-drenched reality can lead to a healthier and more productive relationship with digital tools.

This is not tolerance, complacency, minimization or desensitization, but acclimation. Acclimation to better situate ourselves, reclaim control, and make more sustainable decisions with our technology. The shit’s not going anywhere clearly. […]

Instead of mourning our sense of direction, how can we use our map apps to seek out tiny shops and cafes for a better sense of locality and sense of neighborhood in cities? […]

Instead of falling into endless content holes, how can we congregate and self-teach ourselves material which was once worth tens of thousands of dollars behind an ivy academic wall, and is now free on YouTube this very second? […]

Agency will come from curiosity, questioning and understanding — not removal, ignorance, or denial.

§ Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public. Oliver Wainwright on the renovation and reopening of “the extraordinary Warburg Institute.” Click through and then click every link in his piece. Covers an emblem that depicts “concentric circles bound by intertwined arcs,” representing “the four elements, seasons and temperaments, as mapped out by Isidore of Seville.” The history of images, a flight from the Nazis, an installation named the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, magic, and a unique cataloguing system.

§ What’s a brain? By Claire L. Evans. “Maybe that’s why I’m so interested in minimal cognition. Not only because it opens up the definition of what a brain can be, but because it binds us to the world, drawing our brains into a broader phenomenon that touches life at every level. We’re nothing special. As Reid said to me, laughing, ‘in some ways, it's information processing all the way down.’”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Foom_ A Strategic Simulation. Intriguing, and considering the team behind it, definitely keeping a close eye on this one. “Foom is a live simulation where your decisions directly shape the future of AI, from its risks to its breakthroughs. Navigate complex, evolving scenarios and see how your choices influence the trajectory of tomorrow’s technology.”
• Designing Futures – Speculation. Critique. Innovation. “Complements the book Designing Futures – Speculation, Critique, Innovation. A guide to exploring, visualizing and negotiating future scenarios. With additional digital resources and links.”
• Angels and Other Cows: A Celestial Adventure into AI Worlds, the Social Good, and Unknown Connections. “Introduces AI ethics, social justice and social connection concerns in fiction form, engaging readers’ attention. Explores alternative realities and pushes the boundaries of what is possible. Intricately ties advancing AI technology to social science issues”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Nvidia just dropped a bombshell: Its new AI model is open, massive, and ready to rival GPT-4. “Nvidia’s decision to make such a powerful model openly available could accelerate AI research and development across the field. By providing access to a model that rivals proprietary systems from well-funded tech companies, Nvidia may enable smaller organizations and independent researchers to contribute more significantly to AI advancements.” Yes, but aren’t they also going after their clients?
• Sad Boomers, sober Zoomers, sidelined Gen Xers (again), and no avotoast for Millenials. “We used four different generative AI models to create a series of images that explore each generation across five areas of their lives: identity, relationships, work/education, lifestyle, and consumer habits to understand how much these images would confirm or contradict our typical generational stereotypes.”
• FTC Report Confirms: commercial surveillance is out of control. Not AI per se, but overlaps. “Tech giants are widely harvesting and sharing your personal information to fuel their online behavioral advertising businesses. … Demonstrates how commercial surveillance leaves consumers with little control over their privacy. While not every investigated company committed the same privacy violations, the conclusion is clear: companies prioritized profits over privacy.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Where cargo bikes are freeing cities from polluting vans. “Some battery-assisted cargo bikes can haul more than 600 pounds of goods, showing the potential to displace many half-empty vans.”
• Transforming our built environment. Free streamed lecture by Deb Chachra at Media Evolution. “This lecture is for anyone working with, studying or researching the futures of our built environments - from urban planners and architects to city officials, designers, technologists and educators.”
• Global energy perspective 2024. “As the global energy transition enters a new phase, our Global Energy Perspective 2024 presents a data-driven view of the possible road ahead.” It’s McKinsey so read with that in mind.

Asides

• 🤯 🤯 Quantinuum Successfully Teleports a Logical Qubit. “Teleportation relies on another quirk of quantum mechanics know as entanglement, which can link physical systems together so that they share a quantum state. This connection makes it possible to quickly transfer quantum information between two entangled particles even when they’re a significant distance apart from each other.”
• 😍 🦋 🎥 Brilliant dots of colour form exquisite patterns in this close-up of butterfly wings. “A spellbinding close-up on butterfly and moth (or Lepidoptera) wings, Biopixels stitches together images drawn from a collection of some 50,000 specimens at the Patel Lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory at the University of Chicago.”
• 🤩 📸 🔭 🪐 Astronomy Photographer of the Year for 2024. “Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. You can also check out some of the shortlist entries and runners-up in each category.”
• 🤮 💩 🕶️ Microsoft is discontinuing its HoloLens headsets. Importantly: “Microsoft has now teamed up with Anduril Industries, the military tech company started by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, to improve its IVAS mixed reality headsets used by the US Army.”