Thought Shrapnel

I’ve already shared “technologist and climate geek” Ben James' most recent blog post about off-grid solar power. Digging into other posts unearthed one about his opinion that either “a country with no choice” or a billionaire will unilaterally start spraying sulphur into the stratosphere to help cool the earth. Or at least stop it heating so quickly.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM), as it’s known, is controversial, but has become less so recently. There’s an argument to be made that the $20 billion cost per year would be well worth it to buy us more time. I don’t know enough about this, but it’s clear that this is something that is likely to be on the table as a strategy, and probably won’t go through the UN or an international body first.

Sulfur disappears from the atmosphere quickly - it rains out after about a year. This means that once we’ve started SRM, it’s dangerous to suddenly stop. We need to keep spraying particles, all the time. If we suddenly stopped, the warming would spring back rapidly, causing a bad temperature shock. The correct way to stop is a gradual phase out.

Unfortunately, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has some fairly gigantic problems.

1. It doesn’t fix the root cause. Cooling the planet does not remove the CO2 which has accumulated in our atmosphere. It doesn’t stop that CO2 from acidifying the oceans and irreversibly destroying marine biodiversity.

2. SRM could make us complacent about dramatically cutting emissions.

3. Sulfur increases acid rain (harmful to many life forms) and will likely harm the ozone.

4. If SRM is poorly implemented, it could dramatically change weather and rainfall patterns. For example, if sulfur is not injected near the equator, it will not evenly mix into the stratosphere, causing uneven cooling and heating.

[…]

Crucially, the biggest problems with SRM are probably not yet known. The side effects of putting sulfur into the stratosphere could be some of the most consequential unknowns in human history. Clearly, that’s a huge reason to do more research. But still - no matter how much research is done, when humanity tries to bend nature to its will, we can be sure that unintended consequences won’t be far behind.

[…]

People underestimate how controversial it can become to not do SRM. Imagine you are the leader of a country close to the equator. Crop failures, extreme heat, and city-destroying cyclones mean that your people are without drinkable water, have nowhere to sleep, and cannot feed their children. Mass social unrest and physical violence become normal for your country. SRM is the only action that you can take to turn off the disasters, and prevent your government being overthrown.

[..]

Ultimately, the decision to turn on the SRM machines will not be made by climate scientists, or carefully calculated risks. It will be made on the basis of nations rising or falling - by starving populations, revolutionaries, and leaders with their back against a wall.

[…]

Geoengineering is no replacement for getting our shit together. But there would be no honour in allowing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, simply because they could have theoretically been avoided through more mitigation.

[…]

SRM might not make sense in your mind (it certainly doesn’t in mine). But do you view the world in the same way as a military dictator, “benevolent” billionaire, or leader of a starving country?

Source: Ben James

There’s a scene in one of my favourite films, The Dark Knight in which Arthur, Bruce Wayne’s butler, explains that “some men just want to watch the world burn.” There are some mighty fine memes as a result.

But it’s true. Sometimes it’s because they’ve got no power, so they might as well provoke something that might be entertaining. What have they got to lose. Other times, it’s because they’ve got all the power, and they have crazy theories about world overpopulation.

Either way, there’s new research into this mindset which shows that this is a psychological trait separate to others. I’m going to quote Brian Klaas at length, who explains in an excellent post.

These people, according to the new research, share a desire to “unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” This trait now has a name — and an established psychological profile.

It’s called the “Need for Chaos.” Understanding it provides an important insight into the destructive world of modern politics, in which the trolls have taken over, and politicians are no longer problem solvers, but are rather political influencers. It’s not about making the world better. It’s about burning down the world of people they hate.

[…]

In particular, people who score high on this metric tend to answer that they agree with several of these statements:

1. I get a kick when natural disasters strike in foreign countries.

2. I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.

3. I think society should be burned to the ground.

4. When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn.”

5. We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.

6. I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.

7. Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.

Then, to make sure that people weren’t just ticking the box next to every question mindlessly, the researchers included two additional statements that were the opposite of the other seven:

1. We need to uphold order by doing what is right, not what is wrong.

2. It’s better to live in a society where there is order and clear rules than one where anything goes.

Interestingly, when they looked at other toxic personality profiles — such as psychopathy (being a psychopath) and social dominance orientation (an urge to assert social dominance) — they found that the Need for Chaos was a separate dimension to destructive individuals. It wasn’t just capturing the same impulse.

It’s a unique trait.

[…]

The Need for Chaos trait is particularly damaging for individuals who also feel that they’ve been failed by society, manifesting in their loneliness. For them, sowing chaos is a way to lash out against the system while asserting their power and trying to establish some form of social status.

[…]

That creates a strange dynamic, in which most white men—by virtue of their historically privileged position in society—tend to score lower on Need for Chaos than other groups. However, when white men do score high on Need for Chaos, it’s particularly dangerous. To put it plainly, the research suggests that of those who have this chaotic trait, it’s most destructive when that person is a white man.

[…]

The challenge for modern politics, then, lies with figuring out a way to deal with the inevitable perceived loss of social status that accompanies a society that’s becoming more equal, while mitigating the damage that these aggrieved chaos agents can inflict on everyone else.

Source: The Garden of Forking Paths

A decade ago, I was going to so many in-person conferences that I had both a dedicated blog and Twitter account. These days, I attend rather less. No longer being on Twitter, and my conference blog long-ago being mothballed, I’m lacking a place to put reflections on events.

The purpose of this post isn’t even that, to be honest. I was just so blown away by Indy Johar’s presentation at the Systems Innovation Network conference today that I needed somewhere less ephemeral to put the notes that I managed to tap out with my thumb.

Don’t ask me questions about any of this. Not only am I still new to the whole world of systems thinking, but Indy seems to have a galaxy-level brain. Go and check out the Dark Matter Labs website.

Situating the moment:

1. Climate breakdown (not change, losing predictability and insurability - therefore access to capital markets)

2. Mass multi-polar, multi-perspectival transition (different kinds of transitions in different parts of the world)

3. Securitization of everything (pervasive in all of our conversations - everything driven by risk and security - energy, minerals, nutrient supplies)

Emergent term of ‘security economics’ changing market dynamics. ‘No transition without justice’ not simply a slogan, it’s important to be able to find a way forward (e.g. UBI or ‘universal basic nutrition’ experiments)

5. Inequality and loss of solidarity

6. Hugh interest rate environment - inflationary economic context. Going to see more shocks to the economic system.

Difficult to price the material economy because of volatility.

7. Rise of environmental righy politics - localism, etc. will be co-opted by the far right. AfD / far-right of Conservative Party. Boundary words: who’s inside and outside the community.

Systems Practitioners shouldn’t use ‘community’ as too entangled. Be careful about language we’re giving power to.

8. Labouring the transition - don’t have a labour force for the transition (great ideas, but can’t implement them).

Having to think about the constraints in the innovation landscape. Materially affecting our reality: UK can afford to build 14,000/year according to Paris Agreement carbon budget. Labour government has promised to build 350,000/year. Need to do things differently - open up new pathways (right to homes).

Persisting with illusions of infinite supply - instead we need to look at constraints because that’s where the innovation is.

9. Flooding with information - c.f. McLuhan’s thought about confusing a system by flooding it with info. People just spot patterns.

Far right give you a meme to help you understand reality - they hijack a pattern analysis.

10. Scale of the shift - only 7.2% of global economy is ‘circular’ and it’s declining. Need fundamental shifts in material economy.

11. Volatility in the system massively increasing - energy costs, food costs

12. New Allies - central banks, security services, intergenerational wealth, civil society. Need to have representatives from these types of organisations at this conference. New theories about asset ownership.

Westminster living in synthetic domain. Everyday politics to what we’re observing.

“Systems is about conversation not communication.” This means we can deal with more information than previously thought.

Security & Resilience of Systems

“Pre-emptive peace strikes” in places where there’s risk of systemic volatility.

Risk to whom? Rooted in assets and value, rooted in monetary frameworks. Preservation of power.

Uncrystalised risk in the system. If you put the risks on the balance sheets, the organisations aren’t solvent anymore. No longer viable. Collision and corruption therefore becomes a systemic risk - interested in survival.

(e.g. of Kristallnacht and insurance companies not paying for broken windows but instead paying ‘force majeure’ money to Nazi Party)

Explosion of sovereignties - more of an agentified world view. People don’t ‘assign’ their sovereignty to the state as they did in the past. Multitude of sovereignties.

Need to work beyond democratic renewal systems - legitimacy? “States are not the public”

Systems scaffolding - who owns the solution for portfolio (unless the system wants to implement, just remain as sticky notes). Need to work as system capabilities level.

Trans-systems work. Structural systems transformation.

Constraints - key shifter of innovation space.

‘Trap’ of the system boundary and the other. Need to build new language. Different dynamics to bounded models.

Systemic gap in price and value. Unpriced value in the system - going to be something that organised a lot of systems work (e.g. looking at single food product or wider systems level)

Deep Code failure at systems level. Language probel - use old world language which traps us. Also ‘property rights’ like to be challenged.

[Dark Matter iceberg graphic]

Building compound learning organisations and systems. Freedom and agency must lie in the actor for a system to be a system. That means learning. How do we build these?

Chief Learning Officers instead of CEOs. Coherence is formed not around risk but about capacity to learn. Higher overheads, but higher resilience and innovation capacities.

Crisis-driven system transitions. We’re going to live in a world where crises shatter Overton Windows. Emerging Theory of Change.

Big challenge is legitimacy. Mountains over mountains.

Single-point optimisation doesn’t work for an entangled planet. Need to focus on multi-point optimisation.

Multi-organisation organising. Contracting and coordination makes that difficult - what are the frameworks here?

Difficult for states to impose transition, needs to be negotiated.

System financing, structured economic systems, and para-colonizing financial capital. How do you move capital through a non-colonial lens? Capital is an extension of the dominion theory of the world.

‘System accelerators’

Intermediary agent-trust economy. How to build a different way to finance things. Turning energy meter into financial instrument? Public interest micro-trusts. Way of regulating the translation space. Weak signal.

Relationship with material economy - borrowing, not owning.

Freedom and systems - we need to build capacity for agents to be free (not in terms of market choice, but free in terms of being radically human). People and institutions feel trapped. Combined with volatility and uncertainty this creates fear.

First movers - food, material economy

We’re trying to make stuff circular that shouldn’t be. Biomaterial level? Needs to interact with nutrition system. Also river systems work (key fragility point)

Dark Matter Labs has new publication about portfolios - who owns them? New ways of organising to deal with portfolio allocation.

Problem of having the incumbents in the room when we’re talking about system transitions. 40% of the people who this issue will affect aren’t even born. Might be worth having empty seats to recognise this?

We don’t have data infrastructure - cities can’t calculate carbon emissions. Can’t just be ‘open data’ as requires security.

Operating in a deep war of values - e.g. billionaires willing to throw money at throttling the human race because they think this is the answer. Accelerating towards a ‘throttling event’. Very different perspectives on the table.

Our own governance - need integrity. Systemic question.

Financing the deep work - real issue, end up talking about surface level.

How do we move from communities of care based on fear (i.e. the far right) to communities of care based on love?

I’ve read some of the thoughts in this post via Low-Tech Magazine especially around the DC/AC/DC conversion being pointlessly lossy. However, this is the first I’ve read of being able to use excess solar power to create other forms of energy.

[S]olar deployment is accelerating at breathtaking speed. Most of the world’s solar power was installed in the past 30 months. In fact, China installed more solar in 2023 than the US has installed in history.

In the UK in 2024, I can go online and buy a solar panel with the same dimensions as a fence panel, for only double the cost. In five years, the cost of solar will have halved again.

[…]

Solar will saturate the power grid, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll stop building it. It just means that we’ll use it off-grid.

[…]

The cost of solar energy in a sunny place is trending towards virtually-free.

This is solar’s opportunity to not just displace electricity supply, but also primary energy supply. Rather than simply supplying energy in the form it’s consumed (electricity), intermittent solar is so fricking cheap that it could manipulate atoms into fuels for subsequent consumption.

We’re talking about using solar to create synthetic kerosene for planes, clean ammonia for fertiliser, clean methanol for shipping, and maybe even synthetic natural gas for general purpose use.

These synthetic and ‘green’ fuels all rely on green hydrogen as a base ingredient. Green hydrogen is extraordinarily expensive to produce, and the only cost-competitive way to make it is off-grid solar.

[…]

Taking solar off the grid also has a few other major cost advantages. If you are ripping solar straight into a DC application, you can skip the costs and efficiency losses of inverting that power into AC. If you lose most of the balance of plant, power electronics, and the paperwork of a grid connection, you’re getting really cheap and fast.

Source: Ben James

After discovering this site earlier in the week, I’ve shown it to my wife and my mother. I’m interested in the results, because they’re the two people in my life that I’ve most disagreed with when it comes to the question “what colour is that?”

It turns out that, when it comes to the blue-green continuum, my wife isn’t so far away from me. But my mother? According to her, something isn’t “blue” unless it’s very blue. Fascinating from a phenomenology-in-practice point of view.

Source: ismy.blue

Although there’s plenty of people who would say otherwise, I think we’re in an antediluvian period with LLMs. We’re not seeing ads inserted or intentional misinformation being spread through mainstream offerings.

It won’t be long, though, and weak signals like this give us a glimpse of the future.

This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories–recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users' responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction. After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.

Source: MIT Media Lab

I enjoyed this rant that starts off talking about shaving being too expensive, and ends by giving examples of things that have replaced other things, and are worse.

(FWIW I’ve found that Bulldog razors seem to last a lot longer than other cartridge-based options)

So, does this matter? I assume that for most of the people reading this, the sums of money involved may seem pretty trivial. But I think the changes in the razor market are obviously bad, and reflect similar changes that can be seen in many other markets. We see new products launched which promise minor benefits in convenience, and which crowd out older, cheaper, and better products. Those older products are deliberately marginalised, and more money is captured from consumers without them really gaining any value from their expenditure.

[…]

Tea bags replace loose leaf tea. Allows for lower quality tea to be sold, diminishes the re-use of tea leaves. Also ludicrous product differentiation along the lines of ‘we have a special shaped tea bag’.

[…]

Subscription services like Hello Fresh, where you can pay well over the odds to have some vegetables delivered to you.

Source: John’s blog

I just saw that Tom Critchlow has taken a job, which is surprising given how much he waxed lyrical about the independent life. That post took me to one he wrote earlier this year about being useful rather than giving advice.

Giving advice starting with “you should…” is problematic, as I think we all come to learn through experience in both our personal and professional lives. It assumes you have all of the context, which is almost never true. Instead, pointing out “opportunities to…” is a much better framing.

Otherwise, as a consultant you’re telling them to do the very thing they don’t have the capacity to do. You’re telling them to draw the rest of the owl in the meme.

After all, it’s rare that a client doesn’t know have any clue what they need to do. Usually, in my experience at least, they need help choosing between options, and then capacity-building to get there.

Giving advice is an intensely personal thing. The feeling of learning something new sits right next to the feeling of shame for not knowing it in the first place. And worse, in the client/consultant relationship, the client is at least partially complicit in the situation when they come to you.

[…]

Giving advice is fraught even if the problem is well defined and you do know the answer. So when you’re working on strategic, ill-defined projects where there isn’t a right answer - giving advice is incredibly delicate, and in some cases not even possible.

So if you’re asking “You should…” to the client, stop and examine if you’ve properly defined the situation and provided evidence for the problem, to help the client deeply internalize the problem and win over the necessary stakeholders before you propose any kind of solution.

[…]

“There is an opportunity to…” This phrase is the key - it places the focus correctly on first defining the problem - and then providing evidence - before focusing on the solution. It allows us to articulate and quantify the opportunity while leaving room for the client to have say over resource allocation, for the client to shape the solution and for the client to determine prioritization and timing.

[…]

This all builds up to my personal consulting mantra: always work on the next most useful thing.

This mantra helps remind me that consulting isn’t about being right, it’s about being useful.

[…]

Always work on the next most useful thing. And that doesn’t always involve doing what the client asked for.

Source: Tom Critchlow

I was pretty amazed that Team Belshaw already does at least 75 of these 100 tips to sort your life out. Here are three that I personally don’t currently do, but which I might start doing.

21. Carry ‘vex money’ Always carry enough cash to get you out of danger or trouble if other methods fail – a taxi fare at least.

[…]

56. Try coffee planking “Every morning I get up and make coffee for my wife and me. One cup takes one minute 18 seconds to brew, and every morning for the last 12 months I have planked for this period. Simple thing, using the dead time.” Anonymous reader

[…]

81. Keep track of praise and thanks Reader Sarah, who works as a teacher, keeps every thank-you card she has ever been given: “When I’ve had a rough day at school, I flick through them to remember some of the lives I have had an impact on.” Another reader, Lewis, saves positive messages about himself: “When times are tough or I’m feeling down, I dig through it and remind myself of the good things people have shared with me over the years.”

Source: The Guardian

We have satellite imagery of pretty much every area of land on Earth. This is known as ‘LandSat’ and this website allows you to spell out your name, or any other word, using rivers and other geographical features!

Source: Camp LandSat

I haven’t actually finished listening to the whole episode yet, but I can already highly recommend this conversation between Adam Grant and Trevor Noah.

The conversation they have about context towards the start is so important that I wish everyone I know would listen to it.

Trevor Noah is widely admired for his quick wit. He’s hosted The Daily Show and the Grammy Awards, sold out huge arenas around the world, had numerous hit comedy specials on Netflix, and published a bestselling memoir, Born a Crime. One of the keys to his success is his ability to read people and communicate clearly. In a lively discussion with Adam, Trevor dives into the importance of context in everything from personal relationships to global politics. The two also debate the best way to improve American politics — and Trevor does a few impromptu impressions, including one of Adam.

Source: WorkLife with Adam Grant

Although there are some positive use cases, one of the most toxic things about X/Twitter has been the ‘dogpiling’ that happens as a result of someone quote-posting something to their followers.

So much so, in fact, that Mastodon has long-resisted implementing them at all, although there are some workarounds in various Fediverse apps.

It’s fantastic to see, therefore, that Bluesky, a federated social network that runs on a different protocol to Mastodon, seems to have found a way to allow for non-toxic quote-posting.

(Since Elon Musk refused to comply with Brazilian law leading to X being blocked there, half a million new accounts have been created on Bluesky. Also, lots of people who I recognise from OG Twitter have started following me this week, which would suggest some form of tipping point…)

As of the latest app version, released today (version 1.90), users can view all the quote posts on a given post. Paired with that, you can detach your original post from someone’s quote post.

This helps you maintain control over a thread you started, ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the other hand, quote posts are often used to correct misinformation too. To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future.

Source: Bluesky blog

I don’t know about you, but responding to a family member, friend, or professional contact using a meme has been a daily event for a long time now. It’s now over 12 years since I gave my meme-laden talk at TEDx Warwick based on my doctoral thesis. A year later, I gave a presentation (in the midst of growing a beard for charity) which used nothing but gifs. But I digress.

This article from New Public gives a typology of meme-sharing, which is useful. One of the things I wish I had realised, because looking back with hindsight it’s so obvious, is the way that memes can be weaponised to create in-groups and out-groups, and to perpetuate hate. Not that I could have done much about it.

There are at least three types of connections that can be forged through meme-sharing: bonding over a shared interest such as movies, sports, and more; bonding over an experience or circumstance; or bonding over a feeling or personal sentiment.

[…]

Sharing memes to connect over common interests is perhaps the most surface-level form of meme-sharing. It hinges exclusively on having shared cultural references rather than shared personal commonalities. These exchanges are more likely to occur in established relationships, such as among family and friends that have shared lived experiences and therefore are exposed to the same cultural references and social cues.

[…]

Connecting over a shared interest can be like connecting over a single data point. But people are so much more complicated. That is why connecting over experiences, which are often inherently more rich and embedded with memories and emotion, can yield a more powerful connection.

[…]

Connecting over shared feelings can be even more moving. There is something particularly intimate about connecting over emotions, and at the same time, universal. As humans, we are rarely self-aware of all of our internal thoughts and feelings, so a meme that can connect with them unexpectedly, like the one below (sound on!), can be powerful.

[…]

These three ways of forming connection through meme-sharing are of course not mutually exclusive, and they are far from being collectively exhaustive. There are definitely instances of meme-sharing which accomplish all of these…

And there can also be situations in which people share memes for reasons outside of connecting over identity, experience, or feelings. Rather, what this typology illustrates is the ways that we can (and do!) cultivate belonging with others online through the sharing of comedic imagery.

Source: New Public

Image: Know Your Meme

Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have published a report on Fediverse governance which is the kind of thing I would have read with relish when I was Product Manager of MoodleNet. And even before then when I was presenting on decentralisation and censorship in the midst of the ‘illegal’ Catalan independence referendum.

These days, while still interested in this kind of stuff, and in particular in [how misinformation might be countered in decentralised networks]9bonfirenetworks.org/posts/zap…) I’m not going to be reading 40,000 words on the subject (PDF). Instead point others to it, and in particular to six-page ‘quick start’ guide for those who might be new to the idea of federated governance.

I wouldn’t have guessed, going in, that we’d end up with the major structural categories we landed on—moderation, server leadership, and federated diplomacy—but after spending so much time eyeball-deep in interview transcripts, I think it’s a pretty reasonable structure for discussing the big picture of governance. (The real gold is of course in the excerpts and summaries from our participants, who continuously challenged and surprised us.)

There are no manifestos to be found here, except in that our participants often eloquently and sometimes passionately express their hopes for the fediverse. There are a lot of assumptions, most of which we’ve tried to be pretty scrupulous about calling out in the text, but anything this chunky contains plentiful grist for both principled disagreement and the other kind. Our aim is to describe and convey the knowledge inherent in fediverse server teams, so we’ve really stuck close to the kinds of problems, risks, needs, and challenges those folks expressed.

Source: Erin Kissane

Image: Google Deepmind

To be a professional, a knowledge worker in the 21st century, means keeping up with jargon, acronyms, and shifts in terminology. Some of this is necessary, as I’ve explained in my work on ambiguity, some isn’t.

This article by Kristine Chompff on the Edalex blog introduces a term new to me: “life-ready signals”. It doesn’t seem to me destined to catch-on, any more than ‘durable skills’ has or will, but is nevertheless a worthy attempt to recognise the behaviours that go around hard skills and knowledge.

I also think that we need to do something about the acronym soup: while I might understand someone saying that we use RSDs to build a VC as part of a learner’s PER within an LER ecosystem, it’s gobbledegook to everyone else.

For anyone interested in this kind of thing, we have a community of practice called Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE) which you can discover and join at badges.community)

For us to understand life-ready signals, we must for a second talk about semiotics and the definition of terms. Because the term “life-ready skills” has evolved, so has the term “life-ready signals.”

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, of which language is a part. It depends partly on the object being described, but also on the way the person reading that description interprets it. For these terms to be meaningful, we all need to interpret them in the same way.

Life-ready skills are the thing being described. Life-ready signals are those “signs” being used to describe them. For a learner to tell their own story, they need to be equipped not only with the skills themselves, but the proper “signs” to share them with others in a meaningful way.

It’s also important to note here that with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) there will always be skills that machines will never master, and those are the life-ready skills we are discussing here.

Source: Edalex blog

Image: Giulia May

This is such a great article by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Quoting philosophers, he concisely summarises the difficulty of parenting, examines some of the tensions, and settles on a position with which I’d agree.

It’s such a hard thing to do, especially with your first child, that I’m amazed there’s not some kind of mandatory classes. The hardest bit isn’t even the dealing with a new helpless infant, but the changes that kids go through on the road to adulthood. While we all went through them from the inside, trying to understand and help from the outside (while dealing with your own issues) is so difficult.

The fact that children are their own people can come as a surprise to parents. This is partly because young kids are so hopelessly dependent, but it also reflects how we think about parenthood… We talk as though having children is mainly “a matter of inclination, of personal desire, of appetite,” the philosopher Mara van der Lugt writes, in “Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?” She sees this as totally backward… Having children, van der Lugt argues, might be best seen as “a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible.” We are deciding “that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted,” and we “must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.”

[…]

Van der Lugt is not pronatalist, but she isn’t anti-natalist, either. Her contention is simply that we should confront these questions more directly. Typically, she observes, it’s people who don’t want kids who are asked to explain themselves. Maybe it should work the other way, so that, when someone says that they want kids, people ask, “Why?”

[…]

In a 2014 book, “Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships,” the philosopher Harry Brighouse and the political theorist Adam Swift ask how we might relate to our children if we understand them, from the beginning of their lives, as independent individuals. There’s a tension, they write, between the ideals of a liberal society and the widely held “proprietarian view” of children: “The idea that children in some sense belong to their parents continues to influence many who reject the once-common view that wives belong to their husbands,” they note. But what’s the alternative? What would a family look like if the fundamental separateness of children was taken for granted, even during the years when they depend on us the most?

[…]

If the relationship between parents and children is based not on the proprietary “ownership” of kids by their parents but on the right of children to a certain kind of upbringing, then it makes sense to ask what parents must do to satisfy that right—and, conversely, what’s irrelevant to satisfying it. Brighouse and Swift, after pushing and prodding their ideas in various ways, conclude that their version of the family is a little less dynastic than usual. Some people, for instance, think that parents are entitled to do everything they can to give their children advantages in life. But, as the authors see it, some ways of seeking to advantage your children—from leaving them inheritances to paying for élite schooling—are not part of the bundle of “familial relationship goods” to which kids have a right; in fact, confusing these transactional acts for those goods—love, presence, moral tutelage, and so on—would be a mistake. This isn’t to say that parents mustn’t give their kids huge inheritances or send them to private schools. But it is to say that, if the government decides to raise the inheritance tax, it isn’t interfering with some sacred parental right.

[…]

“The basic point is simple,” they write. “Children are separate people, with their own lives to lead, and the right to make, and act on, their own judgments about how they are to live those lives. They are not the property of their parents.”

Source: The New Yorker

(use Archive Buttons if you can’t get access}

This is an interesting article by Justine Tunney who argues that Open Source developers are having their contributions erased from history by LLMs. It’s interesting to consider this by field, as LLMs seem to have no problem explaining accurately what I’m known for (digital literacies, etc.)

As Tunney points out, the world of Open Source is a gift economy. But if we’re gifting things to something ingesting everything indiscriminately and then regurgitating in a way that erases authorship, is that problematic?

In a world of infinite automation and infinite surveillance, survival is going to depend on being the least boring person. Over my career I’ve written and attached my name to thousands of public source code files. I know they are being scraped from the web and used to train AIs. But if I ask something like Claude, “what sort of code has Justine Tunney wrote?” it hasn’t got the faintest idea. Instead it thinks I’m a political activist, since it feels no guilt remembering that I attended a protest on Wall Street 13 years ago. But all of the positive things I’ve contributed to society? Gifts I took risks and made great personal sacrifices to give? It’d be the same as if I sat my hands.

I suspect what happens is the people who train AI models treat open source authorship information as PII [Personally Identifiable Information]. When assembling their datasets, there are many programs you can find on GitHub for doing this, such as presidio which is a tool made by Microsoft to scrub knowledge of people from the data they collect. So when AIs are trained on my code, they don’t consider my git metadata, they don’t consider my copyright comments; they just want the wisdom and alpha my code contains, and not the story of the people who wrote it. When the World Wide Web was first introduced to the public in the 90’s, consumers primarily used it for porn, and while things have changed, the collective mindset and policymaking are still stuck in that era. Tech companies do such a great job protecting privacy that they’ll erase us from the book of life in the process.

Is this the future we want? Imagine if Isaac Newton’s name was erased, but the calculus textbooks remained. If we dehumanize knowledge in this manner, then we risk breaking one of the fundamental pillars that’s enabled science and technology to work in our society these last 500 years. I’ve yet to meet a scientist, aside from maybe Satoshi Nakamoto, who prefers to publish papers anonymously. I’m not sure if I would have gotten into coding when I was a child if I couldn’t have role models like Linus Torvalds to respect. He helped me get where I am today, breathing vibrant life into the digital form of a new kind of child. So if these AIs like Claude are learning from my code, then what I want is for Claude to know and remember that I helped it. This is actually required by the ISC license.

Source: justine’s web page

Image: Marcus Spiske

If any government is going of, by, and for the people, then we can’t have unaccountable black box algorithms making important decisions. This is a welcome move.

Source: The Guardian

Artificial intelligence and algorithmic tools used by central government are to be published on a public register after warnings they can contain “entrenched” racism and bias.

Officials confirmed this weekend that tools challenged by campaigners over alleged secrecy and a risk of bias will be named shortly. The technology has been used for a range of purposes, from trying to detect sham marriages to rooting out fraud and error in benefit claims.

[…]

In August 2020, the Home Office agreed to stop using a computer algorithm to help sort visa applications after it was claimed it contained “entrenched racism and bias”. Officials suspended the algorithm after a legal challenge by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the digital rights group Foxglove.

It was claimed by Foxglove that some nationalities were automatically given a “red” traffic-light risk score, and those people were more likely to be denied a visa. It said the process amounted to racial discrimination.

[…]

Departments are likely to face further calls to reveal more details on how their AI systems work and the measures taken to reduce the risk of bias. The DWP is using AI to detect potential fraud in advance claims for universal credit, and has more in development to detect fraud in other areas.

Alexandra Samuel points out in this newsletter that a lot of the work we do as knowledge workers will increasingly be ‘meta-work’. Introducing a 7-step approach, she first of all outlines why it’s necessary, especially in a ‘neurovarious’ world.

I think this is a really important article, and hits the sweet spot between AI literacy, systems thinking, and working openly. One to bookmark, for sure.

In the AI era, knowledge production will increasingly get done by machines—which means that the meta-work of choosing tools and processes is not just the work that remains for humans, but the most valuable kind of work you can do. Meta-work is how we get past all the one-size-fits-none approaches that have cursed us with overload and overwhelm, because we’re trying to work in a way that doesn’t don’t account for the vast differences in how each of us thinks, perceives, and communicates.

When we get overwhelmed by our tasks or stuck in our writing or thinking, it is often because we need to do some meta-work.  

[…]

The more deeply I dive into the world of neurovariety—the functional differences in how workers think, perceive and communicate—the more I see that effective meta-work depends on understanding your own particular thinking, perception and communication style.

Meta-work requires you to think about how you build and create knowledge, to consider where you truly add value to your organization or to the world, and to recognize that there is no right answer to any of these questions—just the closest answer you can find for yourself, right now.

Source: Thrive at Work

Google’s new Pixel 9 smartphones are being heavily marketed as having their AI tool, Gemini , onboard. One of the things this allows you to do is to use a tool called ‘Reimagine’ that allows you to add new things to a scene simply via a text prompt.

It’s getting easier and easier to create realistic versions of events which never really happened. In the example above, they circumvented the cursory safeguards to simulate an accident. Fun times.

Reimagine is a logical extension of last year’s Magic Editor tools, which let you select and erase parts of a scene or change the sky to look like a sunset. It was nothing shocking. But Reimagine doesn’t just take it a step further — it kicks the whole door down. You can select any nonhuman object or portion of a scene and type in a text prompt to generate something in that space. The results are often very convincing and even uncanny. The lighting, shadows, and perspective usually match the original photo. You can add fun stuff, sure, like wildflowers or rainbows or whatever. But that’s not the problem.

A couple of my colleagues helped me test the boundaries of Reimagine with their Pixel 9 and 9 Pro review units, and we got it to generate some very disturbing things. Some of this required some creative prompting to work around the obvious guardrails; if you choose your words carefully, you can get it to create a reasonably convincing body under a blood-stained sheet.

In our week of testing, we added car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images. That seems bad. As a reminder, this isn’t some piece of specialized software we went out of our way to use — it’s all built into a phone that my dad could walk into Verizon and buy.

Source: The Verge