Posts Tagged ‘automobile’
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower”*…
Dan Davies took a ride in a silver machine…
A while ago, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on a Google DeepMind project called “The Habermas Machine”. It’s a really intriguing use of the LLM technology – basically, you take a lot of people who disagree with each other and ask them what they think about an issue. Then you feed their answers into a model, which tries to produce a statement of minimal agreement that all of them might sign up to. They score the extent to which they do agree with it (which trains the model), and explain what it is that they don’t like about the statement. This second round allows the model to come up with another, better version, which also clarifies to the participants what the other side’s reasons are for disagreeing with them.
It’s called “The Habermas Machine” because it’s meant to, loosely speaking, do a similar job to Jurgen Habermas’ “Ideal Speech Environment,” In tests, there seems to be decent evidence that not only is the machine better than a human moderator at coming up with consensus statements, but that the machine-moderated process leads to more convergence of opinions among the actual participants. (I think I might have predicted this; the model obviously has a “flat” affect, and unlike a human being, isn’t always leaking clues from its intonation and body language about what it really thinks of the participants. That might suggest that as LLMs get better at simulating human responses, they might be worse for this purpose!)
There’s really a lot to say and think about this. But it’s Friday [as he wrote this] and I’m a facetious person, so instead I’m going to share the notes I’ve been making ever since seeing the presentation on which other philosophers and social theorists might also benefit from having machines made out of them.
The Giddens Machine – in accordance with the principle of double hermeneutics, it’s the Habermas Machine, but only for reaching agreement on interpretations of Habermas.
The Goffman Machine – after your side lost on the Habermas Machine, it comes along and generates a set of reasons why you shouldn’t feel so bad about that and should come back for another go.
The Bourdieu Machine – you type your views into it, and then it repeats them with slight and subtle adjustments to make you sound more middle class
The Fourcade/Healy Machine – it gives you a score, then makes you do the work of finding out how to change your views so as to increase your score. Finding equilibrium for the machine is your job now.
The Gambetta Machine – instead of finding a consensus, it selects the most awful version of each conflicting view, and then everyone switches to that in order to show how committed they are.
The Austin Machine – instead of telling the machine “I agree with this statement”, you have to tick a box saying “I hereby agree with this statement”.
The Grice Machine – like the Habermas one, but via conversational implicature it aims to create consensus among all the views that you haven’t expressed rather than the ones you have.
The Derrida Machine – everyone keeps asserting the same statements, but the AI brings them into agreement by changing the meaning of the words themselves.
The Crenshaw Machine – in each round the machine finds a new issue to divide up the group in a different way. Equilibrium is reached when everyone realises they’re on their own and need to get along with each other anyway…
A wry exploration of the possibilities of AI: “Fully automated social theory,” from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social
(Image above: source)
* Alan Kay
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As we delegate discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the first production model of the DeLorean sports car rolled off the assembly line at the Dunmurry factory, located a few miles from Belfast City Centre in Northern Ireland.
“Like so many named places.. it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts– census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway”*…
Dallas-Fort Worth has one of the world’s most extensive urban freeway systems. It is the product of the pro-growth ambition of political and business leaders, and has empowered the ambition of real estate developers, big business, the technology industry and entrepreneurs. The North Texas cultural spirit to think big and build big has guided the ongoing growth and expansion of Dallas-Fort Worth freeways, a transportation system which has propelled North Texas to be among the most economically successful regions in the United States in the post-World War II era. Dallas-Fort Worth Freeways documents the origins, politics, influence and resulting urban landscape of North Texas freeways…
The very complete– and lavishly illustrated– history of the Dallas-Fort area’s motorways: “Dallas-Fort Worth Freeways.”
See also the same author’s equally remarkable “Houston Freeways.”
* Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
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As we watch for our exit, we might send motile birthday greetings to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, he was born on this date in 1725. In 1769, Cugnot, a military engineer, invented the world’s first fuel-propelled vehicle–a gun tractor commissioned by the French government. The following year he produced the first mechanically-driven “horseless carriage”; his steam tricycle, driven by a steam engine, carried four passengers and was the forerunner of the modern motor car.
There are reports of a minor incident in 1771, when the second prototype vehicle is said to have accidentally knocked down a brick or stone wall, either that or a Paris garden or part of the Paris Arsenal walls, in perhaps the first known automobile accident.
“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves”*…
Produced at the height of the Cold War [1956], and made at the behest of the American Petroleum Institute (still the biggest lobby for the U.S. oil and gas industry), this great little promotional film from John Sutherland Studios [producer of other such gems as “Rhapsody of Steel,” “A is for Atom,” and “Wise Use of Credit’; c.f. here] champions not only the wonders of oil as might be expected, but also free-market capitalism. The surprisingly humorous cartoon tells the story of how the suspiciously Stalin-like leader of Mars, named Ogg, sends a rather calamity-prone citizen to Earth to find a better power source for his poorly-running “state limousine”. The exploring Martian, of course, lands in the United States and soon discovers the many and myriad delights of petroleum, and that, in contrast to his home planet, competition between companies is rife. His take-home lesson (and one drilled into the viewer on numerous occasions) is that “competing for the customer’s dollar” is key to the success of the oil industry and, of course, the thriving country as a whole. Delivering the news to Ogg back on Mars, the leader replies defiantly that “competition is downright un-Martian”, but the ordinary Martians are not to be deterred and soon rise up to overthrow Ogg and set up a thriving oil industry (and capitalist culture) of their own — the short ending with the slogan “destination unlimited” writ proudly across the screen…
Via Public Domain Review, and the Internet Archive.
* Eric Hoffer
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As we fill ‘er up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that Bertha Benz, wife of inventor Karl Benz made the first motor tour. Without her husband’s knowledge, she borrowed one of his cars and with their teenage sons travelled 180 km to visit relatives for 5 days. She drove her sons, Richard and Eugen, 14 and 15 years old, in Benz’s newly-constructed “Patent Motorwagen” automobile, from Mannheim to Pforzheim– a distance of more than 106 km (66 miles). She thus became the first person to drive an automobile over more than just a very short distance… and in so doing, brought her husband’s handiwork worldwide attention, securing his company’s first sales.
The Benz Patent-Motorwagen Number 3 of 1886, used by Bertha Benz for the highly publicized first long distance road trip
“The best car safety device is a rear-view mirror with a cop in it”*…
From Ulysses S. Grant to Philando Castile— how the automobile fundamentally changed the relationship between the police and the citizenry: “A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).”
* Dudley Moore
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As we stay in our lanes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1900 that the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was founded in Akron, Ohio (also home to arch-rival Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and another two mid-sized competitor tire places, General Tire and Rubber and BF Goodrich). The company’s founder, Harvey Firestone, parlayed his close friendship with Henry Ford into a role as prime tire supplier to the Ford Motor Company, starting in 1906 with tires for the Model T. In 1926, the company opened the Firestone Natural Rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia. The largest plantation of it’s kind in the world, it operated until it was seized, in 1990, by Charles taylor and his NPFL forces. The company’s ventures in Liberia have been the subject of considerable scrutiny and criticism, including a 2005 Alien Tort Claims Act case brought in California by the International Labor Rights Fund and a 2014 investigative report by ProPublica entitled “Firestone and the Warlord,” and a PBS Frontline documentary by the same name.
The first Firestone store
If we do not meet with agreeable things, we shall at least meet with something new…
Just over 250 years ago, a short volume by Voltaire– Candide, ou l’Optimisme— was making the underground rounds. Within a month of its publication in January of 1759, the Grand Council of Geneva and the administrators of Paris had banned Candide; still, it sold twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions, a clear best-seller by the standards of the time. In 1762, Candide joined Giordano Bruno’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. (Indeed, though its authorship was a badly-kept secret, Candide was, as can be noted above, ostensibly written by “Doctor Ralph’; Voltaire only admitted his paternity in 1768.)
Now, through April, readers can revel both in Voltaire’s sardonic indictment of optimism (and poor Gottfried Liebniz) and in the stories that surround it: The New York Public Library is hosting “Candide at 250: Scandal and Success”– an exhibit (at the Schwartzman Building Gallery) and a wonderful on-line experience.
Then, “let us cultivate our garden.”
As we discipline our inner Pangloss, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that Karl Friedrich Benz patented the Benz Patent Motorwagon– the first “automobile” entirely designed to generate its own power (via a water-cooled gasoline engine)… that’s to say, not simply a motorized stage coach or horse carriage.
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