washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

3 books

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I’m reading a WIRED article (just after reading a top of the page article about how their content and platforms aim to be increasingly human) that mentions 3 authors of 3 recent books:

Keep reading — in order to keep decoding.

Seeking more content about these authors, I’ve read how:

Jeff Kampfe, a student at SantaClara University, interviewed Vallor in 2019, when she stated:

The ability to act on inferences about the future that are produced by a system that doesn’t understand any of the data that it’s working with, that doesn’t understand the world the data represents, and that doesn’t have any relationship of care of with the persons who generated the data is very sensitive. We’re transitioning to a place where the kinds of data insights that previously would be drawn by people, people who would have knowledge of what the data represented and have the social context to understand the meaning of the data, are now being made by machines.

The sentence that “The first [virtue of a ‘good’ data scientist] would be the virtue of humility.” And, “Understanding the people behind the data means understanding that you cannot simply erase the data that are inconvenient.”

In terms of big to do that I had not read of anywhere else:

It’s worth noting that the Association of Computing Machinery, the largest organization of computing professionals, updated their code of ethics this summer for the first time in decades. One of the changes that they made was to include in the code of ethics a commitment to a minimalist approach to data collection and storage. The  default practice of “collect it all, store it all, for what purpose we do not know, but let’s have it on hand so that we can use it later should we find a purpose” has been explicitly rejected by the ACM code of ethics.

Meanwhile, Merchant interviewed Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: dreams and nightmares in sam altman’s openai, on the inaugural video-podcast 2 months ago (in May) on his blog of the same title: Blood in the Machine, which ironically, or oddly, or both, is on Substack.

Hao, interviewed by Cecile Mauran on Mashable in May, stated:

the farther away your life is from theirs in Silicon Valley, the more this technology begins to break down for you.

All technology revolutions leave some people behind. But the problem is that the people who are left behind are always the same, and the people who gain are always the same. So are we really getting progress from technology if we’re just exacerbating inequality more and more, globally? 

And, to close, the four word story: empires control knowledge production.