Notices by Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me), page 4
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 16:11:56 JST 
Per Axbom
"Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?
Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a...
Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.
In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.
In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.
Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?"
The answer is yes.
In a world of sharing ideas across languages, understanding how and why languages make us think, behave and reason differently from each other is increasingly important.
"All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express.
The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are."
« Watch Lera Boroditsky's talk. Lera Boroditsky is an associate professor of cognitive science at University of California San Diego and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world and language (or how humans get so smart).
She once used the Indonesian exclusive "we" correctly before breakfast and was proud of herself about it all day. »
https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think
The quotes above are from her 2010 Wall Street Journal article Lost in Translation:
http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/wsj.pdf
Also read:
The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19857320/ -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 02:53:24 JST
Per Axbom
I'll add clarifications regarding some of the topics to this thread. 👇
Regarding Monoculture.
Today, there are nearly 7,000 languages and dialects in the world. Only 7% are reflected in published online material. 98% of the internet’s web pages are published in just 12 languages, and more than half of them are in English. When sourcing the entire Internet, that is still a small part of humanity.
76% of the cyber population lives in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, most of the online content comes from elsewhere. Take Wikipedia, for example, where more than 80% of articles come from Europe and North America.
Now consider what content most AI tools are trained on.
Through the lens of a small subset of human experience and circumstance it is difficult to envision and foresee the multitudes of perspectives and fates that one new creation may influence. The homogenity of those who have been provided the capacity to make and create in the digital space means that it is primarily their mirror-images who benefit – with little thought for the wellbeing of those not visible inside the reflection. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 02:53:22 JST
Per Axbom
Regarding Power concentration.
When power is with a few, their own needs and concerns will naturally be top of mind and prioritized. The more their needs are prioritized, the more power they gain. Three million AI engineers is 0.0004% of the world's population.
The dominant actors in the AI space right now are primarily US-based. And the computing power required to build and maintain many of these tools is huge, ensuring that the power of influence will continue to rest with a few big tech actors. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 02:53:20 JST
Per Axbom
Regarding Invisible decision-making.
The more complex the algorithms become, the harder they are to understand. As more people are involved, time passes, integrations with other systems are made and documentation is faulty, the further they deviate from human understanding. Many companies will hide proprietary code and evade scrutiny, sometimes themselves losing understanding of the full picture of how the code works. Decoding and understanding how decisions are made will be open to infinitely fewer beings.
And it doesn't stop there. This also affects autonomy. By obscuring decision-making processes (how, when, why decisions are made, what options are available and what personal data is shared) it is increasingly difficult for individuals to make properly informed choices in their own best interest. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 02:53:18 JST
Per Axbom
Regarding Bias and injustice.
One inherent property of AI is its ability to act as an accelerator of other harms. By being trained on large amounts of data (often unsupervised) – that inevitably contains biases, abandoned values and prejudiced commentary – these will be reproduced in any output. It is likely that this will even happen unnoticeably (especially when not actively monitored) since many biases are subtle and embedded in common language. And at other times it will happen quite clearly, with bots spewing toxic, misogynistic and racist content.
Because of systemic issues and the fact that bias becomes embedded in these tools, these biases will have dire consequences for people who are already disempowered. Scoring systems are often used by automated decision-making tools and these scores can for example affect job opportunities, welfare/housing eligibility and judicial outcomes. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 02:53:17 JST
Per Axbom
Regarding Content moderator trauma.
In order for us to avoid seeing traumatitizing content when using many of these tools (such as physical violence, self-harm, child abuse, killings and torture) this content needs to be filtered out. In order for it to be filtered out, someone has to watch it. As it stands, the workers who perform this filtering are often exploited and suffer PTSD without adequate care for their wellbeing. Many of them have no idea what they are getting themselves into when they start the job. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 02:53:15 JST
Per Axbom
Regarding Data / Privacy breaches
There are several ways personal data makes its way into the AI tools. First, since the tools are often trained on data available online and in an unsupervised manner, personal data will actually make its way into the workings of the tools themselves. Data may have been inadvertently published online or may have been published for a specific purpose, rarely one that supports feeding an AI system and its plethora of outputs. Second, personal data is actually entered into the tools by everyday users through negligent or inconsiderate use – data that at times is also stored and used by the tools. Third, when many data points from many different sources are linked together in one tool they can reveal details of an individuals’ life that any single piece of information could not. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 15:14:17 JST
Per Axbom
Water required by data centers is increasing considerably with the advent of generative AI. Large language models trained on vast amounts of data need substantial cooling.
While some may argue that water can be reused, it is often pulled from water supplies in times of significant heatwaves, when residents are in need of it as well, and supplies diminsh faster.
In July of 2022, Microsoft pumped in about 11.5 million gallons of water to its cluster of Iowa data centers, according to the West Des Moines Water Works. That’s around 6% of all the water used in the district, which also supplies drinking water to residents.
Meanwhile, the energy required is of course not recycled – and it’s to be expected that energy use is growing as well. The companies behind the tools are just not disclosing how much their AI investments are costing us when it comes to their carbon footprint.
”In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research.”
https://fortune.com/2023/09/09/ai-chatgpt-usage-fuels-spike-in-microsoft-water-consumption/ -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Sep-2023 22:29:13 JST
Per Axbom
“According to Mozilla research, popular global brands — including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, Kia, and Subaru — can collect deeply personal data such as sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health and genetic information, and where you drive.
Researchers found data is being gathered by sensors, microphones, cameras, and the phones and devices drivers connect to their cars, as well as by car apps, company websites, dealerships, and vehicle telematics.
Brands can then share or sell this data to third parties. Car brands can also take much of this data and use it to develop inferences about a driver’s intelligence, abilities, characteristics, preferences, and more.”
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/ -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Sep-2023 06:03:40 JST
Per Axbom
Heads up, because this will start happening more regularly in the next six months:
If a person sends a bot (will be marketed as an ”AI assistant”) to participate in their place at an online meeting you are hosting, your safest option is to kick it out. That bot will be recording everything and using it for things that meeting participants have not consented to. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Saturday, 02-Sep-2023 21:47:47 JST
Per Axbom
AI won't steal your job.
A person using AI to fake your skills will.
Then the AI will cause them to make a devastating mistake.
And they won't know how fix it.
That's when you get your job back.
Remember to request a higher salary. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Saturday, 02-Sep-2023 20:37:02 JST
Per Axbom
I will be expecting Nobel Prize winners to boycott the award ceremony (on December 10) after the committee’s bizarre decision to invite Russia’s ambassador, along with the ambassadors of Belarus and Iran. This year’s event is now already ill-fated.
Boycotts have been announced by a several party leaders in Sweden. The only one announcing that she will take part is Ebba Busch, Leader of the Christian Democrats and Minister for Energy, Business and Industry. No final decisions have been communicated from Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrats), or prime minister Ulf Kristersson (Moderate party). Johan Pehrson (Liberal Party) has – on X – vaguely suggested he may not attend. -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Sunday, 06-Aug-2023 16:59:11 JST
Per Axbom
@kashhill So bizarre to see this happening all around. My latest post is about exactly this, misattribution of authors and non-existent books.
https://axbom.com/ux-authors-wonderland/ -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Monday, 31-Jul-2023 08:20:47 JST
Per Axbom
@samuel I found this one when I wrote my post about online resilience:
https://www.freehosting.com/free-hosting.html
My original post:
https://axbom.com/25y/ -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Monday, 24-Jul-2023 21:20:00 JST
Per Axbom
Your friendly reminder to download your Twitter (X) archive as long as it's still possible. (And as long as you're still interested in keeping the content you produced there)
https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Friday, 23-Jun-2023 03:36:53 JST
Per Axbom
A common argument I come across when talking about ethics in AI is that it's just a tool, and like any tool it can be used for good or for evil. One familiar declaration is this one: "It's really no different from a hammer". I was compelled to make a poster to address these claims. Steal it, share it, print it and use it where you see fit.
https://axbom.com/hammer-ai/
#AiEthics #DigitalEthics -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Friday, 23-Jun-2023 03:36:52 JST
Per Axbom
Poster: If a hammer was like AI.
#AiEthics -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 01:25:52 JST
Per Axbom
More and more coming across "podcasts" that can only be listened to on a specific platform, not in my podcatcher (any app for listening to podcasts via RSS feeds).
If a podcast doesn't disclose its RSS feed, is it really a podcast, or just an audio show that happens to be published on a specific platform?
In my mind podcasting is about the listener experience and mode of consumption as much as the production experience. If I can't listen to it like I do 99% of all podcasts, then for all intents and purposes it is not a podcast.
I know most people don't think about RSS feeds at all when listening but I had to mention it here as it's the mode of distribution that makes everything I just mentioned possible, with regards to freedom of listening where I want. Not where someone else wants.
#podcast #podcasting -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Saturday, 06-May-2023 19:52:28 JST
Per Axbom
@fyrfli Yes, it would appear populist homophobia has kept many politicians in power.
https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/videos/queer-african-history-must-be-told-and-documented-featuring-selly-thiam-of-none-on-record/ -
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Per Axbom (axbom@axbom.me)'s status on Saturday, 06-May-2023 18:36:25 JST
Per Axbom
”By donning a second-hand hat, a 74-year-old man is about to become monarch of a small island kingdom”
As expected, the best reporting on today’s coronation comes from @thecontinent
While many mentioned atrocities are well-known, this part of erased African history is rarely talked about:
”While England has records of who lived in what village in 1068, its empire was quick to destroy the histories of those it colonised. These could then be overwritten with Protestant orthodoxy and white exceptionalism, banning things like queer love, once part of Africas cultural fabric.”
https://www.thecontinent.org/
#Coronation
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