Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
“I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.”*…
Alva Noë on the importance of humans hanging on to their humanity– for all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does:
Computers don’t actually do anything. They don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute. Which doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve. The new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare. We need to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech. But it ought to be possible to do so without succumbing to bogus claims about machine minds.
What could ever lead us to take seriously the thought that these devices of our own invention might actually understand, and think, and feel, or that, if not now, then later, they might one day come to open their artificial eyes thus finally to behold a shiny world of their very own? One source might simply be the sense that, now unleashed, AI is beyond our control. Fast, microscopic, distributed and astronomically complex, it is hard to understand this tech, and it is tempting to imagine that it has power over us.
But this is nothing new. The story of technology – from prehistory to now – has always been that of the ways we are entrained by the tools and systems that we ourselves have made. Think of the pathways we make by walking. To every tool there is a corresponding habit, that is, an automatised way of acting and being. From the humble pencil to the printing press to the internet, our human agency is enacted in part by the creation of social and technological landscapes that in turn transform what we can do, and so seem, or threaten, to govern and control us.
Yet it is one thing to appreciate the ways we make and remake ourselves through the cultural transformation of our worlds via tool use and technology, and another to mystify dumb matter put to work by us. If there is intelligence in the vicinity of pencils, shoes, cigarette lighters, maps or calculators, it is the intelligence of their users and inventors. The digital is no different.
But there is another origin of our impulse to concede mind to devices of our own invention, and this is what I focus on here: the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment. The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.
What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness…
[Starting with Turing, Noë considers the relative roles of humans and technology across a number of spheres, including music…]
… The piano was invented, to be sure, but not by you or me. We encounter it. It pre-exists us and solicits our submission. To learn to play is to be altered, made to adapt one’s posture, hands, fingers, legs and feet to the piano’s mechanical requirements. Under the regime of the piano keyboard, it is demanded that we ourselves become player pianos, that is to say, extensions of the machine itself.
But we can’t. And we won’t. To learn to play, to take on the machine, for us, is to struggle. It is hard to master the instrument’s demands.
And this fact – the difficulty we encounter in the face of the keyboard’s insistence – is productive. We make art out of it. It stops us being player pianos, but it is exactly what is required if we are to become piano players.
For it is the player’s fraught relation to the machine, and to the history and tradition that the machine imposes, that supplies the raw material of musical invention. Music and play happen in that entanglement. To master the piano, as only a person can, is not just to conform to the machine’s demands. It is, rather, to push back, to say no, to rage against the machine. And so, for example, we slap and bang and shout out. In this way, the piano becomes not merely a vehicle of habit and control – a mechanism – but rather an opportunity for action and expression.
And, as with the piano, so with the whole of human cultural life. We live in the entanglement between government and resistance. We fight back…
… The telling fact: computers are used to play our games; they are engineered to make moves in the spaces opened up by our concerns. They don’t have concerns of their own, and they make no new games. They invent no new language.
The British philosopher R G Collingwood noticed that the painter doesn’t invent painting, and the musician doesn’t invent the musical culture in which they find themselves. And for Collingwood this served to show that no person is fully autonomous, a God-like fount of creativity; we are always to some degree recyclers and samplers and, at our best, participants in something larger than ourselves.
But this should not be taken to show that we become what we are (painters, musicians, speakers) by doing what, for example, LLMs do – i.e., merely by getting trained up on large data sets. Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.
We can’t help doing this; no computer can do this…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Rage against the machine,” from @alvanoe in @aeonmag.
For more, see Noë’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are.
* Albert Einstein
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As we resolve to wrestle, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock (aided by his student assistant Charley Kline) created the first networked computer-to-computer connection (with SRI programmer Bill Duvall in Palo Alto), via which they sent the first networked computer-to-computer communication)… or at least part of it. Duvall’s machine crashed partway through the transmission, meaning the only letters received from the attempted “login” were “lo.” The next month two more nodes were added (UCSB and the University of Utah) and the network was dubbed ARPANET.
Still, “lo”– perhaps an appropriate way to announce what would grow up to be the internet.
“If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour… then you are the sucker”*…
Patrick Redford in the always-enlightening (and entertaining) Defector, on ESPN’s pivot to wagering…
Like an anglerfish lighting its lure, ESPN is attempting to use the shiny bauble of its broadcast rights and import within the sports media world to tempt people onto its gambling platform. The Worldwide Leader signed a 10-year, $2 billion deal with Penn Entertainment one year ago, on the theory that a fusion of ESPN’s brand with Penn’s sportsbook would make for a serious player in the sports gambling world. That theory, which has borne dubious results thus far, depends upon ESPN transforming itself into a gushing firehose of gambling sludge.
To that end, the company broadcast its gambling show ESPN Bet on regular ESPN for the first time this week, shuffling it over from lesser auxiliary ESPNs onto the main channel for the purpose of shoving the words ESPN Bet—also the name of the company’s sportsbook—in front of as many people as possible before football season. I watched both of this week’s episodes, curious what sort of impression the company would try to make. What strategies would it use to turn parlays into paydays? What I saw was an hour-long advertisement that made thin, watery attempts to justify itself as programming, which it is not. The point of ESPN Bet, italicized, is not to make you smarter about sports or give you good picks, but to divert the nascent gambler away from the two biggest sportsbooks in the country and onto ESPN Bet, plain text.
The show is hosted by Tyler Fulghum and Joe Fortenbaugh. It adheres to a very simple pattern: Here is something you can bet on (e.g.: NFL Comeback Player of the Year, the Cincinnati Reds, Israel Adesanya); here are the odds; here is an affirmative or negative case for why to bet or not bet on or against those odds. There are various gimmicky setups that don’t so much disguise this basic loop as they merely vary its cadence…
…
… Something as abstract as LSU and Miami’s making the College Football Playoff four months from now is already banal talk-show fodder on its own; ESPN Bet‘s outlook is even more refracted. The topic is not whether one or both of those teams make the CFP, but rather how correctly those teams’ respective chances of making the CFP are calibrated on this gambling app. The drama, to the extent there is any, is located not in anything that happens on the field or court, but essentially in arbitrage. ESPN Bet is SportsCenter, but about a number instead of a game.
The ostensible point is to make you, the viewer, a more informed gambler so you can make money. There are a number of lies being told here. The most obvious one concerns the topline nature of the operation: Casinos exist to separate you from your money, not to help you take theirs. No matter how spiffy Fortenbaugh’s mustache is—personally, I think he looks cool; Ray Ratto says he looks like “Ronald Colman in a 1953 black-and-white movie” and clearly means this as a bad thing—and how convincing he is about the solidity of the Orioles money line, anyone who is thinking about this rationally has to know there is no algorithmic way to beat the computers. Rather, if there is, it will not be broadcast in public by the very entity that stands to lose money off anybody learning it. There are sharps and there is everyone else, a dissonance that makes ESPN Bet‘s false performance of gambling knowledge all the more icky.
If you are serious about any of this, you know you’re being sold something. The show knows it’s selling you something, and while this is occasionally acknowledged—Fortenbaugh mentioned on Monday where the sharp money was going, which should prompt any viewer to ask what that makes them—the predatory artifice of ESPN Bet is only barely subtext. The specifics are interesting to the extent that they’re pushing a ton of football futures bullshit, as football is the most gambled upon sport in the U.S. But really, all that matters is that Fulghum and Fortenbaugh look you in the eye and say the words “ESPN Bet.” The show is straightforwardly an ad for the app, which ESPN executives have openly talked about on earnings calls.
The incentives are obvious. DraftKings and FanDuel have roughly equal shares of a combined 74.5 percent of the U.S. gambling market. ESPN Bet, meanwhile, controls a paltry 3.2 percent as of the second quarter of the fiscal year, which is down from 4.7 percent in the first quarter. They are getting crushed. ESPN Bet’s competitors are an order of magnitude larger because of first mover advantage, and the only strategic fulcrum ESPN has to utilize is its essentiality as a broadcaster. ESPN’s value proposition is that unlike DraftKings or FanDuel, it operates a vast media apparatus, one that can set itself on a gentle slope, sliding its audience inexorably toward gambling on their phones. An example of that approach’s noxiousness in practice, as Kathryn Xu wrote earlier this year, is the win probability graphic ESPN slaps on baseball broadcasts. But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s Penn CTO Aaron LaBerge on his company’s earnings call last week:
For example, when we have account linking in November, if you place a parlay on ESPN Bet, it’s going to appear in the ESPN app. You have to do no work. It’s going to be seamless. If anyone here has placed a parlay of more than two or three legs, you know that’s a struggle. And so, it’s just going to be like magic for you to actually consume that within ESPN. (source)
“Magic” is offensively lofty rhetoric to use about “consum[ing] that” when the sum total of “that” is losing $15 on a Jalen Williams-centric parlay without having to leave the ESPN appsphere. In the case of something like the Tigers’ birdbrained same game parlays, there is at least baseball (albeit Detroit Tigers baseball) at the core of the experience. Gambling content that is attached, remora-like, to the side of a sports-watching experience is annoying but ultimately ignorable. ESPN Bet is the gambling content shorn of the sports, like if your spam folder was a TV show.
Consider the question of what sort of audience ESPN Bet is even for. Anyone sharp and dedicated enough to actually make money on sports gambling is not getting their picks from two energetic guys on the TV. A viewer rational enough to know this is a sucker’s game will find ESPN Bet equally useless if not outright reprehensible. A viewer who wants to learn something about sports or have fun will find far better options.
What is actually sinister about this show isn’t its adjacency to gambling, but its nihilism. At best this is a show for nobody. Background music hums along behind the hosts throughout the broadcast, an obvious sign that this is intended less as programming you are meant to pay any actual attention to and more as something engineered to run in the background while you wait out an oil change or a connecting flight, a dog whistle audible to the most abject of marks. It is scarcely distinguishable from the commercials that break up its runtime, as it is itself a commercial. The show walks backward, away from the viewer, hoping to draw them into the void…
“‘ESPN Bet’ Is A Black Hole” (gift article) from @redford in @DefectorMedia.
See also: “Sports Betting Is Legal, and Sportswriting Might Never Recover.”
And for a different (and equally astounding/depressing) example of the outsized impact of money on sports see “Ex-Pac-12 Teams Will Face Some of The Worst Travel Distances in Power-Conference History,” from @Neil_Paine.
* Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) in Rounders
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As we look for the line, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that the World Wide Web was introduced to the world at large.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) proposed the system to his colleagues at CERN. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development, he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format.
The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then– with the publication of this (likely the first public) web page— to the whole Internet 32 years ago today. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created. (Today, while it is understood that the number of active sites fluctuates, the total is estimated at over 1.5 billion… more than a handful, gambling sites.)
“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”*…
A.W. Ohlheiser on a new book, Invisible Rulers— an investigation of the ways in which technology has transformed power and influence– by Renée DiResta, a leader of the late, lamented Stanford Internet Observatory…
… The book examines and contextualizes how bad information and “bespoke realities” became so powerful and prominent online. She charts how the “collision of the rumor mill and the propaganda machine” on social media helped to form a trinity of influencer, algorithm, and crowd that work symbiotically to catapult pseudo-events, Twitter Main Characters, and conspiracy theories that have captured attention and shattered consensus and trust.
DiResta’s book is part history, part analysis, and part memoir, as it spans from pre-internet examinations of the psychology of rumor and propaganda to the biggest moments of online conspiracy and harassment from the social media era. In the end, DiResta applies what she’s learned in a decade of closely researching online disinformation, manipulation, and abuse, to her personal experience of being the target of a series of baseless accusations that, despite their lack of evidence, prompted Rep. Jim Jordan, as chair of the House subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, to launch an investigation.
There’s a really understandable instinct that, I think, a lot of people have when they read about online misinformation or disinformation: They want to know why it’s happening and who is to blame, and they want that answer to be easy. Hence, meme-ified arguments about “Russian bots” causing Trump to win the presidential election in 2016. Or, perhaps, pushes to deplatform one person who went viral by saying something wrong and harmful. Or the belief that we can content-moderate our way out of online harms altogether.
DiResta’s book explains why these approaches will always fall short. Blaming the “algorithm” for a dangerous viral trend might feel satisfying, but the algorithm has never worked without human choice. As DiResta writes, “virality is a collective behavior.” Algorithms can surface and nudge and entangle, but they need user data to do it effectively…
…
…So, what would work?
DiResta’s ideas for this echo conversations that have been happening among misinformation experts for some time. There are some things platforms absolutely should be doing from a moderation standpoint, like removing automated trending topics, introducing friction to engaging with some online content, and generally giving users more control over what they see in their feeds and from their communities. DiResta also notes the importance of education and prebunking, which is a more preventative version of addressing false information that focuses on the tactics and tropes of online manipulation. Also, transparency…
Misinformation: “Why lying on the internet keeps working,” @abbyohlheiser in @voxdotcom.
DiResta on her experience of harassment while at the Internet Observatory: “My Encounter with the Fantasy-Industial Complex” (gift article)
For more on prebunking, see “Fact or Fake? The role of knowledge neglect in misinformation” (source of the image above.
Also apposite: “Is social media fueling political polarization?“
On the other hand, there’s this consideration of misinformation in the larger epistemological context of all of the information available to us: “How Dangerous is Misinformation?“: “The problem with alarmism about “misinformation” is not that it is too pessimistic about the state of media and public discourse. The problem is that it is not pessimistic enough.” Caveat lector.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we steel ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO sighting; Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier (in Washington State) at speeds that he estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.
His was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that attracted nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings– including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold’s description of the objects led the press quickly to coin the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs.
After the 1947 UFO sighting, Arnold became famous “practically overnight.” Arnold’s daughter would later recall the family receiving 10,000 letters and constant phone calls. In the 1960’s Arnold entered politics, running as a Republican for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho. He lost to the Democratic incumbent.
“Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.”*…
And as it is in the human condition, so it is on the internet. As the Pew Research Center reports: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later…
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023…
The not-so-pretty results of their study, and an account of their methodology at “When Online Content Disappears,” from @pewresearch.
Happily, the Internet Archive‘s wonderful Wayback Machine, where one can find saved copies of (many, many, if not all) web pages that have disappeared, is a(n at least partial) antidote. Indeed, via a background script, the Wayback Machine supplies the most recent archived version of many Wikipedia links that have gone dead.
(Image above: source— where one can find the origin of “404” as the designator of a broken link…)
* David Sinclair, controversial anti-aging researcher
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As we search for the missing, we might send elegantly-designed birthday greetings to John Cocke; he was born on this date in 1925. A computer engineer, he made numerous important contributions to computer architecture and to optimizing compiler design. Most notably, he is considered by many to be “the father of RISC architecture” (which first appeared in his design of the IBM 801).
“Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”*…
The number of households that live above the poverty line but are barely scraping by is ticking higher…
Over time, higher costs and sluggish wage growth have left more Americans financially vulnerable, with many known as “ALICEs.”
Nearly 40 million families, or 29% of the population, fall in the category of ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — according to United Way’s United for ALICE program, which first coined the term to refer to households earning above the poverty line but less than what’s needed to get by.
That figure doesn’t include the 37.9 million Americans [individuals, as opposed to families as measured above] who live in poverty, comprising 11.5% of the total population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“ALICE is the nation’s child-care workers, home health aides and cashiers heralded during the pandemic — those working low-wage jobs, with little or no savings and one emergency from poverty,” said Stephanie Hoopes, national director at United for ALICE…
Read on for an explanation of how high inflation and higher interest rates have aggravated what was already a problem: “29% of households have jobs but struggle to cover basic needs,” from @CNBC.
Apposite: “Millions of Americans are about to lose internet access, and Congress is to blame.”
(Image above: source)
***
As we knit a safety net, we might recall that, on this date in 2020, as a product of the COVID-19 recession, the U.S. unemployment rate to hit 14.9 percent, its worst rate since the Great Depression. Federal legislators enacted six major bills, centered on the American Rescue Plan and costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Those programs have now expired.
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