Notices by Frank Pasquale (frankpasquale@mastodon.social)

“With generative AI, we’re once again witnessing a core problem with entrusting technological development to a handful of self-mythologizing executives and founders in Silicon Valley. Instead of systems that are democratically and ethically constructed, built to serve humans and not just managers, whole constituencies and not just consultants; systems that could be very useful in some less-than earth-shattering ways, we get the smoke and mirrors.”
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

Delong: James C. Scott’s most famous book, Seeing Like a State, “mark[ed] the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning.”
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-omnivorous-james-c-scott/

“The perfect postapocalyptic vehicle isn't a big ugly truck. It's a bicycle — light, reliable, easy to fix and scavenge parts for, able to move cargo, doesn't need any power except you and calories. And the thing that will actually get us through an apocalypse — or, preferably, prevent one — isn't driving a steel-plated War Rig. It's working together.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-cybertruck-apocalypse-inequality-2023-12

“The two main architects of a performativist sociology, Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, seem to have moved on to other subjects, while the critical power attached to performativity is now firmly rejected by several heterodox economists precisely because of its lack of a critical spirit with respect to economic theories”
http://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/2746

“A court system that could not control him as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/

“JPMorgan warns that if left unchecked, Spotify’s platform could become littered with AI-generated rubbish, potentially exploding from 100mn songs to more than a billion in a few years. UMG’s “artist-centric” model will dissolve the financial incentives for these AI tracks to proliferate, the analysts say.”
https://www.ft.com/content/b85ab5af-bd03-4da8-971a-316e7c7897dc

“Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world. Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.
A week before meeting the students, I introduced the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/opinion/big-tech-algorithms-kids-discovery.html

“The current “existential threat” framing is effective because it fits on a rolling news ticker, diverts attention from the harms being created right now by data-driven and automated technologies and it confers huge and unknowable potential power on those involved in creating those technologies.”
https://rachelcoldicutt.medium.com/on-understanding-power-and-technology-1345dc57a1a

Can “85 of the world’s most renowned scientists, combining data from 43 studies, mining hundreds of variables collected from more than 10,000, and utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models—help people pick better romantic partners?

No.”
https://www.wired.com/story/data-marriage-behavior-love-psychology-romance/

“Some of the established concerns with large-language models:
1) they are inherently inaccurate and biased; 2) their size and scale means that only large corporations (or states) can develop and administer them, exacerbating various forms of marginalization and inequality;
3) they have a vast, detrimental environmental impact;
4) they intensify the demand for more pervasive and invasive kinds of surveillance”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/every-answer

“Part of the problem is that many police and city officials, rather than denouncing scofflaws or enforcing the license plate laws, are some of the most brazen offenders. He and other advocates say they frequently observe high concentrations of illegal plates around courthouses and police precincts.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/nyregion/license-plate-vigilantes.html