Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
…[t]his is thoughtful, fascinating, insightful details into a theoretical realm of possibility that should excite every living person on the planet. What a trip, just to consider the subjective time-dilation increased mental processing speed would engender; that near light-speed travel might feel to an AI what air travel does to me and you gives me chills.
This is what I mean when I call Superintelligence an impressive feat; I cannot name another book that spits out so much irksome social theory that I would still recommend without caveat. The chains of logic are so clear and smart; it crafts a space to dislike the premise yet love the process. And—as the book itself makes clear—it may believe what it posits, but it doesn’t need you to; Superintelligence just wants people to start talking about the issue.
Read More
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
This paragraph took about...six hours of tinkering to create. I will say that, at the point this was being spit out, I did not think my grand experiment was worth it. I mean, I was thrilled i got anything to work (see above, wherein I produced nothing but sequential numbers), but this sample of my trained model was pretty raw. Perhaps you could separate out some of the parts about “pizza,” “burgers,” and “my tights” to tell a story. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. I want you to see, warts and all, the nonsense I had to pick through to dredge up a few good lines. Context, thy name is not Machine Learning.
Read More
Twitterbots: Making Machines that Make Meaning
Engagement with and understanding of more than just technical breakdowns makes for text that is often engaging regardless of your proximity to bots, AI, or ML writing. It is interesting to see how tech-minded people with a firm grasp of the humanities—rather than the near-exhausted trope of the literary stodge trying to make sense of technology—engage with cultural source. The written word isn’t treated as mere grist for the GPT-2 mill.
Read More
A Prehistory of the Cloud
Without knowing how we got to the cloud, there is no context with which to begin parsing what tech studies in the late twenty-tens should even look like. A Prehistory of the Cloud reminds the reader that for every software-as-solution, the hardware has to be somewhere. The only reason to give away this storage—shroud it with the cloud metaphor and make it appear limitless and eternal—is to incentivize each user to upload everything without thought.
Read More
I AM ERROR
I AM ERROR elucidates the functional, physical aspects of the Famicom and applies that knowledge onto the end product; it is why Mario looks the way he looks, or moves the way he moves; why the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros. are made from the same tiles.
Read More
Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music
Spotify is not a “platform” for musical access in the way that an Atari or Nintendo were designed to give users access to video games, but a brokerage for advertisers to attach their wares to thematic events that are delimited by musical cues. Make a playlist for “morning commute” and you’ve got a self-selected market ready to go, primed to hear ads about office clothes and weekend getaways.
Read More
This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
This is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.
Read More
