the engineers astonishment in the Social Dilemma how “problem solved” has social repercussions #engineeringcultures
so the “father” has figured out, what Social Dilemma cirumvents, the word #capitalism. Uups. i said it.
dealing in fetishized commodities was a fair game as long as it was hardware sold and surplus value skimmed, while exploiting audience #attention #labor is clearly disgusting
Now some scary, scary truths. Because, #surveillance is something really scary. It affects you. Be scared! People love to hear that. Let’s not mention #collective data ownership. Let’s not even mention #communized social media.
Data is not being harvested or scraped or created or colonized. People and processes are pouring #data out. Data shoves itself towards becoming renvenue and value.
Uuups. I’m just an engineer. Let’s just automate this. No human is responsible. Problem solved. In the end it were those systems on their own that started it. #socialdilemma
some side-fun for those who are obsessed with “the #algorithm”. it’s the #model, stupid. (hence not algorithmic bias, but model bias) #mediatheory #STS
well, social sciences had their fair share too. impersonated by Brian J. Fogg
Spending your subjectivity on our platform creates attention rent. The best reason for living that we could could come up with, was extrapolating your attention labor and let you produce more capital from capital. #socialdilemma #whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Male dominated hacker culture re-inforced an #engineering perspective where you toy with technologies and humans all the same.
character mask: “Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” #Zizek 1989
Because again, it’s an individual, not a social problem. I’m so happy that I’m part of the middle class / petite bourgeoisie who can identify the problem and safe its own kids. #socialdilemma #screentime
when you disrupt #regulation through #ethics (side note: a good learning example for #AIethics)
“There’s a law about #Moore’s law,” jokes Peter Lee, a vice-president at Microsoft Research: “The number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.” read this: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-03-12/after-moores-law
The idea, that the brain is hardware is an unproven 1960s theory from #cybernetics. It is more a myth than a theory. The body is wetware, not hardware. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness
Agree, #AI is already at work. Yet, it is not AI which runs the world right now, it is Billions of humans who run a complex infrastructure of databases, operating systems, software applications, and also AI applications.
Cathy O’Neil. The editors cut her too soon.
No. There are almost always humans who tweak the results towards the expected outcome. The computer doesn’t even slightly understand what it processes. Especially not in #MachineLearning. You can’t even say “learning”, it is “conditioning” at best.
Now it gets really strange. The #AI, depicted through 3 identical men (actor: Vincent Kartheiser), tries to actively seduce an off-line user to return to social media.
The (wrong) visual argument is here, that an #AI is able to make decisions like humans are able to. The wrong (narrative) argument is, that seduction is initiated by a conscious #AI. The next scene confirms that.
People should really use the term “Pattern Recognition” or “Statistics” instead of Artificial Intelligence. So you are playing against statistics. And it doesn’t know everything about me. That’s a phantasy.
Technology is framed as “the other”, which will overwhelm “us”. This argument distorts that technology is a social agreement, constituted not by machines but by human interactions and decisions. The server rooms and the software exist, because humans.
the real checkmate humanity is, that humans ascribe so much agency to technology and do not deal with it as a social relation.
the next section with Rashida Richardson, @rosenstein and @gchaslot was well argued
Then again things get mixed up, #democratic elections in europe (favoring right wing parties) with #vaccines #ConspiracyTheories, #HongKong democracy protests with populist elections in Brazil. The argument here: social media did it.
Then follows a weird montage with demonstrations and violence. I’m confused. Are demonstrations bad? Does demonstrating necessarily lead to protesters’ violence? Is police violence because of to much Facebook? This part feels like pure rhetoric for the sake of affecting me
Cathy O’Neil (@mathbabedotorg) comes to rescue.
#TheSocialDilemma frames again the human as a victim of “the algorithm”, unable to decide themselfes. I hope this message still changes towards the end. Followed by a totalizing matrix phantasm from drone perspective
If only he would rephrase. Humans will develop AIs that get better at predicting…
An extremely difficult move by Tristan Harries is to repeat the #conspirational red-pill simulation narrative of the Matrix movie (enforced by sinister dark forces). Couldn’t he use other analogies? That’s where foreshortened #capitalism critique ends up.
That’s what happens when engineers create solutions and are not forced to cooperate with humanities and/or to deliver technology impact assessment. It happens over and over again. #sadface #TheSocialDilemma
The saddest part of #capitalism is that so much human thinking time and labor is wasted on growing revenue. People waste their entire careers on this.
That would be a tax on attention rent. Interesting thought.
… and they should be outlawed, says Zuboff.
Finally. Taking responsibility and talking about how technology is a social relation that can be politically influenced. Why didn’t Jeff Orlowski start with this statement and took it to heart instead of scaring us all the way?
And they can not only change technology (a social relation). They can also change other social relations.
It is really time to change engineers’ education, cause that’s where it starts. in those boys clubs. #PhD
What does #TheSocialDilemma show now? Does it show humans negotiating or struggling towards change? Does it show a democratic process? It shows a finger tip on the keyboards’ enter key. The #AI “realizes” it has to change. What? Solutionist hell. #stupidshortcut
It’s the critics wo are the true optimists (Jaron Lanier)
Francis Hunger (September 23–25, 2020), originally on twitter: https://twitter.com/databaseculture/status/1308880852269531137.
Vaishnavi Reaction: https://twitter.com/vaishnavi/status/1307455391249301504
Wendy Chun Reaction: https://twitter.com/whkchun/status/1310230528910594048
Paris Marx Reaction: https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1310298839090425857