Unmanaged expectations ⊗ Intertwining Indigenous knowledge with synthetic biology ⊗ Mastodon isn’t just a replacement for Twitter
This week →{.caps} Unmanaged expectations ⊗ Intertwining Indigenous knowledge with synthetic biology ⊗ Mastodon isn’t just a replacement for Twitter ⊗ Cory Doctorow wants you to know what computers can and can’t do
A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.200 was The Pirate Codes by Steven Johnson.
Unmanaged expectations
Preparing this issue I read a few pieces on ChatGPT, more specifically Ben Thompson, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor and Ian Bogost, in order of preference. None of them were really what I wanted to feature on this topic. I tried ChatGPT quickly and was impressed-not impressed. One reply will initially blow your mind, then the next one will be so completely wrong that it utterly destroys any trust you might have had. It’s the Wizard of Oz doing something wondrous before proceeding to stumble down the stairs. It’s fun, and I’m sure some fun usages will pop up, and it will progress, but the thing doesn’t understand anything. Thompson has a good comparison with a calculator to explain deterministic vs. probabilistic output. OpenAI spews out a mix of text that is basically statistical (++). There is no understanding there at all.
That’s problematic because it goes from superb to nonsense but also because developers of AIs, and even people writing about them keep using words related to intelligence. That’s not just a semantic debate. How can we be expected to properly evaluate, test, and sometimes use these tools when the whole vocabulary currently used to describe them is erroneous? Messaging, capabilities, expectations, and discourse are all out of whack.
The second thing that annoys me in this whole story is the expectations it stems from. Just below, I point to an interview with Linus Lee, about the tools he builds with generative AI products. He’s not trying to get an intelligent assistant, he’s developing new tools to work and play with the material of text. That seems like a much better approach, and much more aligned with the level of these tools. This obsessions with creating ‘intelligence’ blinds us to simpler uses and leads down some wrong paths. One of the best ‘AI’ products I’ve most consistently used over the last couple of months is the autocompletion of comments in Google Docs. I’ve been editing and reviewing a few articles and the suggestions when commenting are excellent. There’s no hype, there’s no flashing AI bragging, just a commenting feature that helps me along.
Another great tool (although not as great this week) is the GPT-based Ghostreader I mentioned last week and use for the 🤖 Summaries{.ai}. The reasons it works for me is that I don’t use it to not read an article, I use it to summarise something I’ve just read. I have the knowledge to validate what’s generated, so when it kind of sucks, I just rework it. Image generators are the same way, it’s easy to see what the image represents and just gloss over or try to tweak the mistakes. Expectations are adjusted by our previous knowledge, contrary to asking ChatGPT for something we don’t know, with no way to immediately figure out what’s bullshit. If the developers were not hoping to fake true intelligence, they might have integrated something visually to give some weight according to certainty. But you get fewer headlines and less investment that way.
A lot of AI is hidden, which is good. A lot of AI is hidden and it’s problematic, a lot of AI makes wild claims and that’s an issue. Two of the phrases I’ve used most in years of freelancing are ‘manage expectation’ and ‘under-promise, over-deliver.’ The whole AI ‘industry’ could stop scify-ing their ideas, start setting better expectations for themselves, and start putting forward more level-headed expectations out in public. They’d stop going down in flames when over-blown promises unavoidably aren’t met, and everyone could have smarter conversations about their products.
Linus Lee is living with AI
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Linus Lee is living with AI →{.caps} At the intersection of knowledge creation or Integrated Thinking Environment, coding DIY, and generative AI. Not something I feature often, but a good read if those things draw your attention. “It’s important research, and his output is wildly prolific because his workflow is a loop. He researches generative AI, and uses what he discovers to build AI tools that will help him think better and get more done. He uses publicly available AI tools as well as a suite of custom-built models that help him read faster, search through information more quickly, and take better notes.”
Intertwining Indigenous knowledge with synthetic biology
As you’ve probably noticed in the past, I love the calls to imagine better futures and talk loudly about them, as Madeline Ashby and others have said. This piece is exactly that, as Keolu Fox and Cliff Kapono create an Hawaii-based Indigenous futurism that recaptures their history and projects it forward in a vision mixing decolonisation and solarpunk.
That in itself is notable, but I’d add that it is especially relevant as these islands were, in essence, their own planet operating in a circular system preserving the ecosystems and the tribes living on them. It was a smaller-scale version of what we must now learn to do planet-wide. Re-capturing that way of life on the islands with a larger population and new technologies could not only be a superb future for Hawaiians, but also rich in solutions for everyone.
🤖 Summary{.ai} On the potential for Hawaii to use its industrial waste as a source of climate resilience by using technologies such as industrial symbiosis, circular economics, and synthetic biology. … soil bacteria surrounding the [Red Hill] complex could provide valuable insights into complex chemical procedures for the metabolism or digestion of harmful chemicals.{.ailight}
This scale would make it the largest bioreactor in the Pacific. We could fill it with a variety of locally sourced genome-edited canoe bacteria, similar to I. sakaiensis — bacteria that consume plastics. A bioreactor of this scale could metabolize all 79,000 tonnes of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in less than a year. All that mess, gone in a year. […]
One way to build consensus amongst our community is to provide a platform for our community to envision the future. What is the future they want to see? We should work with our community to center the scientific questions we would like to prioritize: How would you like to use synthetic biology to protect or maintain our ‘āina and moana? This way, we can work toward community-driven solutions to these challenges, imagining futures grounded in collaboration, decolonization, and Indigenous resurgence. […]
Indigenous futurism, on the other hand, offers an opportunity to imagine our future based on Indigenous value systems: ==trading a linear or exponential trajectory for a circular one rooted in industrial symbiosis and sustainability. Indigenous peoples are, after all, original environmental stewards with 10,000 years of experience. An Indigenous future can imagine a world without waste.==
Mastodon isn’t just a replacement for Twitter
As I’ve mentioned a few times in various places, I seem to be over the whole microblogging thing, so I haven’t particularly taken to using Mastodon. I might actually try it as more of a blog, and the more interesting transition might be the one described in Hall’s identities framework just after the quotes below.
Regardless, Mastodon is worth keeping an eye on as a decentralisation experiment at a newly relevant scale, especially my own instance, Social.coop. In this piece Nathan Schneider and Amy Hasinoff explain why this model of federation, cooperative governance, democratic decision-making, and subsidiarity deserves a lot more attention an investment, as well as different expectations when arriving from gigantic VC-supported platforms.
There’s a fascinating cluster of ideas and ideals that is currently bubbling, from groups like Social.coop and the fediverse at large, to DAOs, to ‘old school’ mutualism increasingly using tech tools. This Mastodon piece is worth a read under that lens, and so is Spark’s episode on Tech solutionism, mutual aid and cooperatives which also features Schneider, as well as Paris Marx and Greg Lindsay.
🤖 Summary{.ai} As users move to the fediverse, they must learn to become engaged democratic citizens in the life of their networks, as opposed to expecting the "scalability" of corporate social media. To achieve collective governance, tools such as managed server hosting and fiscal sponsorship must be made available, and users should contribute to the development of the software. With the right investments, the fediverse could provide a democratic alternative to Big Social.{.ailight}
As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.” […]
It means that in a large and interconnected system, people in a local community should have the power to address their own problems. Some decisions are made at higher levels, but only when necessary. Subsidiarity is about achieving the right balance between local units and the larger systems. […]
==Learning how to self-govern on social media will take time. It will present new kinds of challenges and new crises. But when the alternative is top-down control by unaccountable corporations and capricious billionaires, we have to try.==
Related →{.caps} Stuart Hall’s identities framework can help understand the rise of Discord and Telegram. First time I see this identities framework, definitely worth adding to your thinking around small groups, “dark forest of the internet,” post-Twitter, etc. “Additionally, Discord and Telegram alike are ==‘chat-first’ interfaces, rather than ‘profile-first’ interfaces. Which means their design is better suited to support fluid self-expression in the moment, as their user is defined primarily by what they say, rather than by the sum of their past actions on the platform==.”
Cory Doctorow wants you to know what computers can and can’t do
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Cory Doctorow wants you to know what computers can and can’t do →{.caps} Doctorow being Doctorow, i.e. in his own style and still militating for some of the same ideas. I love reading him (some don’t), so I even like revisits. In this interview, the part on narrative and peak indifference is the one to pay attention to. “What that narrative can do is shift the point of peak indifference. But, just as importantly, it can keep denialism from sliding into nihilism. What you have to show people is not just how bad it will be if they don’t take action but how much room there is to take action to make things better.”
Taiwan is Pandora, GPUs are unobtainium
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Taiwan is Pandora, GPUs are unobtainium →{.caps} Microprocessor nerdery and geopolitics by Jon Evans. (He uses an Avatar metaphor, Ben Hunt quoted here uses Dune.) “There is no future where the United States can both maintain its existential national interests and allow the world’s principal supplier of semiconductors to come under the direct political control of China. And there is no future where China can both maintain its existential national interests and allow the world’s principal supplier of semiconductors to remain outside its direct political control [..] Taiwan is now Arrakis. It’s now the most important country on earth. And we WILL fight over it.”
Asides
- 💪🏼 🗓 Four-day week: how working less boosts wellbeing and productivity. “One of the largest four-day week trials to date has revealed positive outcomes for employers and employees. It’s time more companies made the switch, writes Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre”
- 😍 🧑🏼🦯 📱 🇬🇧WeWalk raises cash to bring computer vision to smart cane for visually impaired people. “The cane, which costs around $600, can detect physical obstacles on the sidewalk and alert the user through vibrations and sounds, while the app integration enables turn-by-turn navigation too. Last year, WeWalk announced a partnership with Intel-owned Moovit to bring local transit data into the mix.”
- 🕸 👏🏼 🌳 A collection of resources for building a more sustainable web. “While the internet is often portrayed as a weightless counterpart of the physical world, everything we do online, from sending emails to visiting the horoscope section of our favorite site requires a large physical infrastructure and amount of resources.”
- 🤖 ✍🏼 🤔 i trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries - so that i could engage in real-time dialogue with my ‘inner child’
- ☀️ 😃 🇺🇸 Empty roadside land could be producing solar energy. “On a stretch of West Georgia highway, in the triangle of land where an exit ramp meets the road, 2,600 solar panels soak up the bright southern sun. The 5-acre site used to be barren and eroding, but now it provides enough power for more than 100 homes.”
- 🤩 🎥 3D Image Capture Just Got Much Easier. “Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) is a relatively new technique that generates well-lit, complex 3D views from 2D images.”
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