New posts from thoughtshrapnel.com
Thought Shrapnel
F L A M I N G O N E
Miles Astray is a photographer who recently won the People’s Vote and a Jury Award in the artificial intelligence category of 1839 Awards. The photo is of a flamingo whose head is apparently missing.
The twist: the photo is as real as the simple belly scratch the bird is busy with.
With AI-generated content remodelling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content and the creators behind it – from creatives like artists, journalists, and graphic designers to employees in all sorts of industries – I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.
After seeing recent instances of AI-generated imagery outshining actual photos in competitions, it occurred to me that I could twist this story inside down and upside out the way only a human could and would, by submitting a real photo into an AI competition. My work F L A M I N G O N E was the perfect candidate because it's a surreal and almost unimaginable shot, and yet completely natural. It is the first real photo to win an AI award.
Source: Miles Astray
An inferior, or at least grossly limited version of intelligence
Audrey Watters cites the work of Zoë Schlanger who asks what we mean by 'intelligence'. This is important, of course, because we're often prepending the word 'artificial' to it, meaning that we're foregrounding something and backgrounding something else. It's a zeugma.
Really, it's intelligence I've been thinking about lately, as I've been reading Zoë Schlanger's new book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.
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What do we mean, Schlanger asks, by "intelligence"? What behaviors indicate that an organism, plant or otherwise, is "thinking"? How does one "think" without a nervous system, without a brain? Some of the reasons why we've answered these questions in such a way to deny plant intelligence can be traced, of course, to ancient Greece and to the Aristotelian insistence that thinking is the purview solely of Man. It's a particular kind of thinking too that is privileged in this definition: rationality.
And it's that form of "thinking," of "intelligence" that is privileged in the discussions about artificial intelligence. It’s actually an inferior, or at least grossly limited version of intelligence, if it’s intelligence at all — the idea that entities, animal or machine, are programmed, coded. It’s so incredibly limiting.
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: Shane Rounce
If we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another
For the past few years, I've been on the list of 'vulnerable' people who get a free booster Covid vaccine due to my asthma. That's no longer the case, but Covid is still around, and mutating.
This interview with someone who, admittedly, runs a Covid testing company, has made me think that perhaps I need to pay for a private vaccine because I really don't want Long Covid. Even the venerable Venkatesh Rao has written about the cognitive impact that he suspects Covid has had on him.
Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies.
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PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%.
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Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.
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PA: What does this look like if we continue on the way we are doing right now? What is the worst-case scenario? Well, I think there are two important eventualities. So we’re what, four years in? Most people have had COVID three and a half times on average already. After another four years of the same pattern, if we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another.
The Promise and Pitfalls of Decentralised Social Networks
This paper, 'Decentralized Social Networks and the Future of Free Speech Online' explores the potential of decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky to enhance free speech by shifting control from central authorities to individual users. The author, Ted Huang, examines how decentralisation can promote the free speech values of knowledge, democracy, and autonomy, while also acknowledging the inherent challenges and trade-offs in practical implementation.
Huang highlights that decentralized networks face significant challenges in knowledge verification, effective moderation, and avoiding recentralisation. He notes that the ideal of decentralization often conflicts with practical needs, which necessitates some centralised mechanisms for such things as content moderation and cross-community communication. So, Huang argues, to truly empower users, we need inclusive design processes and ongoing policy discussions.
The decentralized social network has been widely viewed as a cure to its centralized counterpart, which is owned by corporate monopolies, funded by surveillance capitalism, and moderated according to rules made by the few (Gehl 2018, 2-3). The tremendous and unchecked power of those giant platforms was seen as a major threat to people’s rights and freedoms online. The newly emergent decentralized social networks, through infrastructural redesign, create a power-sharing scheme with the end users, so that it is the users themselves, rather than a corporate body, that determine how the communities shall be governed. Such an approach has been hailed as a promising way of curbing the monopolies and empowering the users. It was expected to bring more freedom of speech to individuals, and the vision it underscores – openness rather than walled-gardens, bottom-up rather than top-down – represents the future of the Internet (Ricknell 2020, 115).
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The discussion of the decentralization project is trending, but it is too limited because there lacks systematic and critical review on the project’s normative implications. In particular, the current debate is mostly restricted to the technical circle, without sufficient input and participation from other fields such as policy, law and ethics. So far, researchers on the decentralized social networks mainly focus on their technical difficulties and features, rather than its social implications (Marx & Cheong 2023, 2). Lawmakers and regulators in the world have paid little attention yet to regulating this new technical paradigm (Friedl & Morgan 2024, 8). For decentralized networks to serve as the desirable future of online communications, we need to know why this is so and how it can be achieved. Will decentralized networks better facilitate the free speech online than the centralized platforms? How to design the new space to make it really fit with our value commitments? All the utopian and dystopian analyses of the decentralized future are only possibilities: what matters is the choices we make about how these technologies are designed and used (Cohnh & Mir 2022). Value commitments must be carefully examined and considered in the design process.
Source: arXiv
Image: Omar Flores
A smaller human population will immensely facilitate other transformations we need
Chart: Population projections from the U.N. (black) and Tom Murphy (blue)
When it's put as starkly as this, it's interesting to think about a post-peak human population as something that might happen within my lifetime. The article cited below was linked to from this one by Tom Murphy of UC San Diego, who created the chart I've used to accompany this post.
I'm no expert, but Murphy's reasoning seems reasonable, and I'd assume that the existing right-wing 'natalism' is likely to go mainstream within this decade. Interesting times.
Governments worldwide are in a race to see which one can encourage the most women to have the most babies. Hungary is slashing income tax for women with four or more children. Russia is offering women with 10 or more children a “Mother-Heroine” award. Greece, Italy, and South Korea are bribing women with attractive baby bonuses. China has instituted a three-child policy. Iran has outlawed free contraceptives and vasectomies. Japan has joined forces with the fertility industry to infiltrate schools to promote early childbearing. A leading UK demographer has proposed taxing the childless. Religious myths are preventing African men from getting vasectomies. A eugenics-inspired Natal conference just took place in the U.S., a nation leading the way in taking away reproductive rights.
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The alarmism surrounding declining fertility rates is unfounded; it is a positive trend that represents greater reproductive choice, and one that we should accelerate. A smaller human population will immensely facilitate other transformations we need: mitigating climate change, conserving and rewilding ecosystems, making agriculture sustainable, and making communities more resilient and able to integrate more climate and war refugees.
Source: CounterPunch
Here is a book as a toolbox to build actual, hard-tacks answers to the crisis of the Long Emergency
I've been very much looking forward to reading Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield, so I was delighted to discover today that, despite having a release date of 9th July, I could already download the ePUB!
Adam generously featured on an episode during the last season of our podcast, The Tao of WAO and was generous with his time. Go and listen to that to discover what the book's original title was, and also pre-order the book!
I have a particular suspicion of the kind of book that spends 10 chapters telling the reader the many problems that face the contemporary world, and then follows with a final chapter that offers something - socialism, say - as the simple solution to all our woes. I call this the ‘11 Chapter problem’, and warn every author to avoid this trap. It is often easy to diagnose the problem; it is far harder to think clearly about what we are meant to do about it. More often than not the reader is already well aware of the problems: the reason they pick up a book is to find solutions. And this is why I am so excited about Adam Greenfield’s Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. Here is a book as a toolbox to build actual, hard-tacks answers to the crisis of the Long Emergency.
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It starts as a building - a church, a library, a school gym - that is the Lifehouse. This is a place for everyone to go to in an emergency - a flood, fire, or hurricane. It will have a kitchen, beds, clothing storage. But it will also be its own power source - with generators or renewable energy from a wind turbine, or solar panels on the roof. It will also be able to produce its own food with vertical farming technology installed. It will be a tool library that allows for repair and restoration, even outside the emergency - with 3-D printing technology. It will also have a skills library so that the community knows who is a doctor, nurse, teacher or transport.
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But sustaining that effort for the long term - the long emergency itself - is hard. Often communities fail to plan far enough ahead. They split and betray each other. They face insurmountable opposition who wish to take away their autonomy. The Lifehouse is designed with this in mind too. It is not an afterthought, but a deeply considered means in which to think about the future.
Source: Verso Book Club: Lifehouse