New Review Essay on @lmesseri tremendous new book, ethnography & tech, social hopes, & false dreams of tech solutionism. Also discussing work of Andrew Brock, Zeynep Tufekci & Kelsie Nabben on Black Twitter, Twitter & ethnographies of DAOs.
“most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off” #jetpacks
“exactly what the #selfdriving car #robotaxi bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical”
“we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of #tech#billionaires”
The group diligently observes the collective dissent voiced by numerous Meta employees, encompassing #Facebook, #Instagram, WhatsApp, #Messenger, and #Threads, regarding the Meta #company's complicity in the #genocidal war against the #Gaza Strip, its endorsement of the Israeli occupation, and its fueling of the "Lavender" #artificialintelligence system used by the Israeli military to kill #Palestinian individuals within the Gaza enclave.
Am I the only one skeptical about modern developers focusing so much on making AI look and sound like humans? Is it god’s syndrome “create them to reflect their image” kind of thing? Because what I need from AI as an individual is do the mundane tasks and be recognizable. I don’t need it to be able to impersonate a virtual friend or anything.
Earlier today I searched on an interesting question, and found this article that appears to have been generated synthetically by an LLM AI and not proofread at all by humans.
Can you spot where it breaks?
"Can I Use a Crows Foot on a Torque Wrench? Explained by Experts"
Do you REALLY want to get a feel for how GPT-4o does what it does? Just complete this poem — by doing so, you’ll have performed a computation similar to the one it does when you feed it a text-plus-image prompt.
"Artificial intelligence is likely to impact 40 % of jobs worldwide, and 60 % of jobs in advanced economies, such as the US and UK.
If managed poorly, it could be quite the doomsday scenario. It could bring a tremendous increase in productivity if we manage it well, but it can also lead to more misinformation and, of course, more inequality in our society."
I wonder which of those scenarios it will turn out to be. 🤔 😏