Notices by Todd Battistelli (fromtherostra@hcommons.social)

Could the experience we understand as consciousness someday somehow manifest within what we consider to be a machine of some kind?

Maybe. It’s a weird universe.

Will it manifest by funneling language statistics into the world’s most energy-intensive meat grinder?

No.

A complement to “don’t feed the trolls” is “what we pay attention to grows,” which I first encountered while reading adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy.

In turning attention away from trolls, we can turn it toward the practices of care through which we build resilient communities able to guide change.

#organizing #facilitation #TheoryOfChange

Happy 215th birthday to Ernestine Rose, advocate for abolition, women’s rights, and nonreligion.

“In gratitude to the past we ow a duty to the future.”

#history #nonreligion #atheism #HumanRights #advocacy

Check out Paula Doress-Worters’ excellent collection of Rose’s work in Mistress of Herself and her website with more on Rose's life:

https://www.pauladoressworters.com/ernestine-rose-society/about/

AGI fantasies: “We’ll create a god that we can control and exploit for profit.”

It is impressive how hard some trends in instructional design work to cloak conformity behind a facade of agentive student learning and empowerment.

And now these three remain: agitate, educate, organize. But the greatest of these is organize.

(This is not to say that ‘organize’ has to be your favorite or your area of strength.)

A corollary to “don’t obey in advance” is “do build and strengthen networks to provide support for those facing the consequences of disobedience.”

With discussion of “critical” AI literacy, I wanted to revisit this post by @deandad, inviting reflection on definitions: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/%E2%80%98critical%E2%80%99#

For myself, an early understanding of critical practice was strongly influenced by the work of the Frankfurt School.

More recent influences, particularly adrienne maree brown’s work on emergent strategy, have led me to think about the role _conscientiousness_ plays in critical practice: intentionally tending to a multiplicity of perspectives.

Intentionality is necessary because that multiplicity is so easily erased in favor of dominant voices that naturalize inequity as "just the way things are." In tending to people and perspectives overlooked and drowned out by the status quo, critical practice can also be a practice of care.

Exercising care is not compatible with dominant economic frameworks even as these frameworks try to disguise exploitation as care, such as the underpaid nurses and teachers who are expected to give away their labor for the greater good.

In order to unsettle such ideological disguises and naturalizations, critical practice has to identify power differentials, explain how those differentials yield different (and unjust) outcomes, and articulate alternatives.

#critical #CriticalTheory #EmergentStrategy #facilitation #organizing #solidarity #coalition #CriticalAI