New posts from thoughtshrapnel.com
Thought Shrapnel
AI agents as customers
I don’t often visit Medium other than when I’m writing a post for the WAO blog. When I’m there, it’s unlikely that any of the ‘recommended’ articles grab my attention. But this one did.
Although it seems ‘odd’, when you come to think of it, the notion of businesses selling to machines as well as humans makes complete sense. It won’t be long until, for better or worse, many of us will have AI agents who act on our behalf. That will not only be helping us with routine tasks and giving advice, but also making purchases on our behalf.
Obviously, the entity behind this blog post, “next-generation professional services company” has an interest in this becoming a reality. But it seems plausible.
Below is a timeline that encapsulates this progression, providing a roadmap for navigating the impending shifts in the landscape of consumer behavior:
Bound customer (today): Here, humans set the rules, and machines follow, executing purchases for specific items. This is seen in today’s smart devices and services like automated printer ink subscriptions.
Adaptable customer (by 2026): Machines will co-lead with humans, making optimized decisions from a set of choices. This will be reflected in smart home systems that can choose energy providers.
Autonomous customer (by 2036): The machine will take the lead, inferring needs and making purchases based on a complex understanding of rules, content, and preferences, such as AI personal assistants managing daily tasks.
Source: Slalom Business
Image: DALL-E 3
Being a good listener also means being a good talker
What an absolutely fantastic read this is. I’d encourage everyone to read it in its entirety, especially if you’re a parent. The list of things that the author, Molly Brodak, suggests we try out is:
- Let people feel their feels.
- Check your own emotions.
- Talk to children as if they are people.
- Don’t give advice. Not really.
- Don’t relate.
- Ask questions.
I find #5 difficult, have gotten better at #4, and think that #3 is really, super important. I used to hate being talked to ‘differently’ as a child (compared to adults), and have noticed how much kids appreciated being talked to without being patronised.
I’m a child of a therapist. What that means is that I was expertly listened-to most of my life. And then, wow, I met the rest of the world.
It’s a good thing for our survival. It’s what makes this whole civilization thing possible, these linked minds. So why are so many people still so bad at listening?
One reason is this myth: that the good listener just listens. This egregious misunderstanding actually leads to a lot of bad listening, and I’ll tell you why: because a good listener is actually someone who is good at talking.
Source: Tomb Log
Image: DALL-E 3
Post-Holocene preferable future habitats
If someone asks me “what kind of future would you like to live in?” I’m going to just point them to this. It’s the work of Pascal Wicht, a systems thinker and strategic designer who specialises in tackling complex and ill-defined problems.
The dangers and problems with generative AI are many and well-documented. What I love about it is that all of a sudden we can quickly create things that we point to for inspiration and alternative futures. In this case, Wicht is experimenting with the Midjourney v6 Alpha, and there are many more images here.
Future Visualisations for Preferable Futures, using the MidJourney’s Generative Adversarial Networks.
I am in my third week of long Covid again. I can spend one or two hours per day on AI images and doing some writing. These images are part of what kept me motivated while mostly stuck in bed.
In this ongoing series, I continue to use the power of AI to explore a compelling question: What does a future look like where we successfully slow down and avert the looming abominations of collapse and extinction?
Source: Whispers & Giants
Image CC BY-NC Pascal Wicht
Hope vs Natality
Trigger warnings: death, persecution, suicide
Over on my personal blog I wrote that, given the depth of the climate emergency,‘hope’ is the wrong thing to be focusing upon. Will Richardson left a comment which pointed me towards this article by Samantha Rose Hill, a biographer of Hannah Arendt, for Aeon.
Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher who escaped the Nazis. This article is about Arendt’s rejection in her work of the concept of ‘hope’ as being a lot less useful than action. Before getting to Arendt’s thoughts, I just want to share this quotation that is included in the article from Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish poet who wrote about the ways in which hope was used to destroy Jewish humanity. Borowski wrote the following lines while reflecting on his imprisonment in Auschwitz. He killed himself soon afterwards:
Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.
Arendt suggests that hope is part of a desire for a happy ending, not based on the facts around us, but rather wishful thinking:
Many discussions of hope veer toward the saccharine, and speak to a desire for catharsis. Even the most jaded observers of world affairs can find it difficult not to catch their breath at the moment of suspense, hoping for good to triumph over evil and deliver a happy ending. For some, discussions of hope are attached to notions of a radical political vision for the future, while for others hope is a political slogan used to motivate the masses. Some people uphold hope as a form of liberal faith in progress, while for others still hope expresses faith in God and life after death.
Arendt breaks with these narratives. Throughout much of her work, she argues that hope is a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times. She rejects notions of progress, she is despairing of representative democracy, and she is not confident that freedom can be saved in the modern world. She does not even believe in the soul, as she writes in one love letter to her husband. The political theorist George Kateb once remarked that her work is ‘offensive to a democratic soul’. When she was awarded an honorary degree at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1966, the president said: ‘Your writings challenge the mind, disturb the conscience, and depress the spirit of your readers; yet out of your wisdom and firm belief in mankind’s inner strength comes a sure hope.’
I’ve been listening to Ep.28 (‘Superhumanly Inhuman’) of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Addendum which is about the Holocaust. It’s absolutely awful listening, but important stuff to know about. The article continues by talking about this dark period for Jewish and world history:
It was holding on to hope, Arendt argued, that rendered so many helpless. It was hope that destroyed humanity by turning people away from the world in front of them. It was hope that prevented people from acting courageously in dark times.
Caught between fear and ‘feverish hope’, the inmates in the ghetto were paralysed. The truth of ‘resettlement’ and the world’s silence led to a kind of fatalism. Only when they gave up hope and let go of fear, Arendt argues, did they realise that ‘armed resistance was the only moral and political way out’.
Instead, Arendt coined a new term: natality which celebrates the miracle of birth and continued human existence:
An uncommon word, and certainly more feminine and clunkier-sounding than hope, natality possesses the ability to save humanity. Whereas hope is a passive desire for some future outcome, the faculty of action is ontologically rooted in the fact of natality. Breaking with the tradition of Western political thought, which centred death and mortality from Plato’s Republic through to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Arendt turns towards new beginnings, not to make any metaphysical argument about the nature of being, but in order to save the principle of humanity itself. Natality is the condition for continued human existence, it is the miracle of birth, it is the new beginning inherent in each birth that makes action possible, it is spontaneous and it is unpredictable. Natality means we always have the ability to break with the current situation and begin something new. But what that is cannot be said.
Hill, the author of the Aeon article, argues that:
Conceptually, natality can be understood as the flipside of hope:
- Hope is dehumanising because it turns people away from this world.
- Hope is a desire for some predetermined future outcome.
- Hope takes us out of the present moment.
- Hope is passive.
- Hope exists alongside evil.
- Natality is the principle of humanity.
- Natality is the promise of new beginnings.
- Natality is present in the Now.
- Natality is the root of action.
- Natality is the miracle of birth.
What I love about this approach is that, as the article says, it’s kind of a “secular article of faith,” placing the responsibility for action firmly in our hands. Hope is, to some degree, the wish to be told soothing stories by a authoritative figure. It’s time for us to grow up.
Source: Aeon
Image: DALL-E 3
Moderation is up to us now
I’ve curated my comfy middle-class life to such a degree that I mostly hear about the dark underbelly of the web / toxic online behaviour through publications such as Ryan Broderick’s excellent Garbage Day.
In his latest missive, Broderick gives the example of a comedian I’ve never encountered before by the name of Shane Gillis. Go and read the whole thing for the bigger context, but the main point Broderick is making I’ve bolded below. I would point out that the Fediverse is, in my experience, on the whole well-moderated. At least, better moderated than centralised social networks such as X and Instagram.
Last year, Gillis was a guest on the unwatchable “comedy “podcast” Flagrant and had to tell the hosts to stop pulling up and laughing at videos of people with Down Syndrome dancing. Clips from the episode recently started making the rounds again this week on Reddit and X. It’s incredibly uncomfortable to watch.
And, sure, Gillis is not directly organizing any of this larger edgelord behavior. But he can’t be separated from it either. As I wrote above, the companies that run the internet have all but given up moderating it, so that work has to be done by us now. We have to manage our own communities and we have to look out for the most vulnerable. People with Down Syndrome and their loved ones should be able to openly share their lives online without worrying about getting turned into a meme or converted into engagement bait by some anonymous goblin. Even if that means dropping your chill bro facade and riling up the Stoolies when you tell people to stop.
Gills has the biggest podcast on Patreon. He’s been at the top of their charts for over a year. He has a massive platform and he built it by letting every awful guy in the country project themselves on to him. And while he does genuinely seem to really want to use that fame to bring visibility to the Down Syndrome community — and I think it’s admirable that he does — he’s not willing to draw a clear line between visibility and exploitation.
Source: Garbage Day
Image: DALL-E 3
A truly liberatory (digital) future for everyone
After giving a potted history of the internet and all of the ways it has failed to live up to its promise, Paris Marx suggests that we need to start over with the entire tech industry. It’s hard to disagree.
My internet habits are vastly different to what they were a decade ago. Back then, I was seven years into using Twitter, had a great following and ‘personal learning network’. The world, pre-Brexit and Trump had the seeds of the turmoil to come, but Big Tech was nowhere near as brazen as it is post-pandemic, and coked-up on AI fever dreams.
There can only be only conclusion from all of this: the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.
The time for tinkering around the edges has passed, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the only hope to be found today is in seeking to tear down the edifice the tech industry has erected and to build new foundations for a different kind of internet that isn’t poisoned by the requirement to produce obscene and ever-increasing profits to fill the overflowing coffers of a narrow segment of the population.
There were many networks before the internet, and there can be new networks that follow it. We don’t have to be locked into the digital dystopia Silicon Valley has created in a network where there was once so much hope for something else entirely. The ongoing erosion already seems to be sending people fleeing by ditching smartphones (or at least trying to reduce how much they use them), pulling back from the mess that social media has become, and ditching the algorithmic soup of streaming services.
Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone.
Source: Disconnect
Image: DALL-E 3
Subject, Consumer, Citizen
Andrew Curry reflects on the work of Jon Alexander, author of a book called Citizens (2022). Alexander has been on a bit of a journey talking to people, and has made some discoveries.
I’m mainly sharing this for the diagram, which Stowe Boyd also picked up on, and provides a better commentary than I ever could. All I’ll say is that it’s good to see things laid out so clearly, although I would have put the ‘Subject’ column to the right (where it is politically) and made it an easier-to read colour!
[H]eaven knows we have a lot of Sensible Grown-Up Politicians around the place. Albanese in Australia, Starmer in the UK. But: because they have not yet realised, or acknowledged, that our political systems are failing, they don’t have the tools to deal with authoritarianism.
But it’s not just down to them. We can’t sit down in Restaurant Hope and wait for the menu. We need to be in the kitchen.
[…]Authoritarians offer to replace this with a story about being a subject: if we put them in power, they will fix things for us (although they don’t, of course).
[…]
We need to believe in people if we, the people, are to have any hope for ourselves and for humanity.
Source: Just Two Things
Sports betting and neoliberal atomisation
The only times I’ve ever betted on sports is with my father. Back when I lived at home, we’d all choose a horse in the Grand National (out of a hat) and I’d go down with him to the bookies to put the bets on. And then, when we went to a football match at Sunderland, we’d decide what bet to put on, too.
I’ve never betted on sports by myself. It’s a slippery slope, as I know what I’m like. When I was my son’s age (17) I was mildly addicted to scratchcards for a few weeks, but quit when I won enough to break even. That’s why the whole world of sports betting, which I know must be huge given that almost every Premier League football team is sponsored by a related company, is a black box to me.
Drew Austin talks about sports betting not only being the further atomisation of an activity which was at least nominally social, but also the way that it reduces a complex bundle of qualitative emotions down to a set of flat, quantitative, numbers.
As the Facebook/Google/Twitter clearnet dissolves and the internet becomes a dark forest, another relatively recent tech category offers a lens for anticipating the future of shared experience and solipsism: sports betting apps. Although largely unleashed by regulatory changes rather than technical innovation, the rise of mainstream, app-enabled sports gambling has reframed a still-powerful bulwark of mass culture as a solitary pursuit. As televised sports continue fragmenting into digital content just like everything else, sports betting creates a derivative market on top of that content, which in turn yields its own additional bounty of content. If you’ve ever bet on a game and then watched it with other people, you probably realized quickly that nobody cares about your betting angle(s) and that you have to shut up about it. You’re on your own. But if you show up at the Super Bowl party wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, you are a legible entity, and everyone has something to talk to you about. To bet on sports is to share the same space (literal or figurative) with a multitude of people who have their own specific angle and only the meta-game in common. Sports gambling is even more fascinating, however, in the way it alters your brain as a spectator of the game: You exchange a complex bundle of emotional and aesthetic nuance for a purely quantitative perspective, which highlights everything that benefits you and pushes the rest to the background. It’s how it would feel to be a computer watching sports. A lot of things we do on the internet feel like that. Who needs NPCs to interact with when we all act like them anyway? We pay so much attention to how computers are learning to be human, but forget we’re also learning to act like them.
Source: Kneeling Bus
Image: DALL-E 3