tagged: Tech

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that:

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

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Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post.

Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care:

The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.

…

The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns.

Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.

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Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same seven feed aggregators for fifteen seconds at a time, like maybe you’re waiting in line in the grocery store and you can’t do the NYT mini because they’re on strike and you don’t cross picket lines and god forbid you have a single second of mental silence, you can open the app and begrudgingly educate yourself on something that you alleged wanted to learn about at some point in time.

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The first time I took on the role of a lead engineer, a few years ago, I had a really hard time learning how to prioritize and delegate work. For much of my early career, I had simply never needed any planning skills beyond “say yes to everything and work yourself into the ground”. One of the best pieces of professional advice I’ve ever received came during this time, from a mentor who told me to delegate the things I was already good at. If I’m good at something, it means I’m actually equipped to evaluate whether my team is doing a good job. It also means I don’t need the practice as much, so delegating frees me up to improve other skills.

There’s an oft-repeated myth about artificial intelligence that says that since we all know that humans are prone to being racist and sexist, we should figure out how to create moral machines that will treat human beings more equitably than we could. You’ve seen this myth in action if you’ve ever heard someone claim that using automated systems to make sentencing decisions will lead to more fairness in the criminal legal system. But if we all know that humans are racist and sexist and we need the neutrality of machines to save us—in other words, if we should delegate morality to AI—how will we ever know if the machines are doing the job we need them to do? And how will we humans ever get better?

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There’s a depressing sort of symmetry in the fact that our modern paradigms of privacy were developed in response to the proliferation of photography and their exploitation by tabloids. The seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review article The Right to Privacy—which every essay about data privacy is contractually obligated to cite—argued that the right of an individual to object to the publication of photographs ought to be considered part of a general ‘right to be let alone’.

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Like many fundamental assumptions about The Way The Internet Works, the idea that the things you put online stay online feels both arbitrary and inviolable. Once upon a time, the lovable nerds who built the first bulletin board systems decided that anything posted to it would persist on disk until the disk hit capacity, and that (as they say) was that.

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1. non-tech people trash talking tech products that don’t function perfectly as though tech were easy
2. tech people trash talking tech products that don’t function exactly the way they want them to as though tech were easy
3. non-tech people citing Arthur C Clarke’s “sufficiently advanced technology” quote as an excuse for wilful ignorance about the technical systems they use
4. tech people citing Arthur C Clarke’s “sufficiently advanced technology” quote as a justification for hostility and contempt towards their users
5. non-tech people rationalizing bad product decisions as though tech being hard were an excuse for mediocrity
6. tech people rationalizing bad ethical decisions as though tech being hard were an excuse for perpetuating social harm
7. non-tech people thinking the latest brand new disruptive app will generate enough cover to distract from the labour-hostile late-stage capitalist systems they’ve built
8. tech people latching onto universal basic income because it absolves them of the massive inequalities they’ve perpetuated
9. the macbook pro touchbar

it is possible I am in the wrong industry

(This post was first published on Medium.com)

About a week ago, I posted the following tweet:

I have such complicated thoughts about the Ashley Madison hack, much of which comes down to “schadenfreude is ugly and unworthy of us”.

August 18, 2015 at 08:04PM (since deleted)

In the week since a lot of new information has come to light. There has been a second, larger dump with source code and the CEO’s email. We know about “family values” activist Josh Duggar’s account on the site (for which he seems to be more apologetic than, you know, molesting his sisters). We know about women and members of the LGBTQ population living in repressive regimes whose lives have been put at serious risk because of the leak. We know there are already mercenary “security experts” that are using the public’s fear to harvest email addresses for scams. We are starting to see real-world fall-out, including at least two possible suicides that have been linked to this.

In other words, things have gotten a lot more complicated.

This issue is about much more than infidelity. It’s about our vicious delight in negativity, the inevitable failure of computer security and computer literacy, the collateral damage of schadenfreude, the normalization of vigilante justice, and a collective desire for black-and-white judgments.

This is going to get long. Bear with me.

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