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 tyranny


What technology takes from us – and how to take it back

The Guardian

Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out - but it's going to take collective effort Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I'd spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me. The berries on a single spray might range from green through shades of red to the darkness that gives the fruit its name. Partly by sight and partly by touch, I determined which berries were too hard and which too soft, picking only the ones in between, while listening to birds and the hum of bees, to the music of water flowing, noticing small jewel-like insects among the berries, dragonflies in the open air, water striders in the creek's calm stretches. I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam - which was admittedly runny and seedy - but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.


AI Will Kill the Smartphone--and Maybe the Screen Entirely

WIRED

If done right, the AI revolution will free us from their merciless tyranny. Instead, you activate various wearables embedded in your body and have a series of conversations with inanimate objects. You make -style gestures in the air. Things power on, tasks get done, the day begins. It turns out you have no need for a smartphone at all.


Recommender systems, stigmergy, and the tyranny of popularity

Dunivin, Zackary Okun, Smaldino, Paul E.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Scientific recommender systems, such as Google Scholar and Web of Science, are essential tools for discovery. Search algorithms that power work through stigmergy, a collective intelligence mechanism that surfaces useful paths through repeated engagement. While generally effective, this "rich-get-richer" dynamic results in a small number of high-profile papers that dominate visibility. This essay argues argue that these algorithm over-reliance on popularity fosters intellectual homogeneity and exacerbates structural inequities, stifling innovative and diverse perspectives critical for scientific progress. We propose an overhaul of search platforms to incorporate user-specific calibration, allowing researchers to manually adjust the weights of factors like popularity, recency, and relevance. We also advise platform developers on how text embeddings and LLMs could be implemented in ways that increase user autonomy. While our suggestions are particularly pertinent to aligning recommender systems with scientific values, these ideas are broadly applicable to information access systems in general. Designing platforms that increase user autonomy is an important step toward more robust and dynamic information


The real story of the OpenAI debacle is the tyranny of big tech Sarah Radsch

The Guardian

The theatrics of OpenAI's seeming implosion amid the firing of its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, Microsoft's dramatic offer to poach its top executives and staff, and Altman's triumphant return following the ouster of the board has all the trappings of a Hollywood blockbuster. But the drama unfolding should put the spotlight on the tyranny of the tech titans that control critical aspects of the AI ecosystem. OpenAI has developed some of the most advanced large-language models and pioneering artificial-intelligence products, such as the text generator ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E, which have been responsible for making generative AI into a household term and discussion about AI risks into dinnertime conversation. Although OpenAI is in the spotlight, however, Microsoft has played a leading role in the unfolding drama. Microsoft swooped in to scoop up the ousted executives and create a new AI research division for Altman to lead, with hundreds of staff reportedly ready to follow them.


'Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse': Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech

The Guardian

What could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order? The mental imagery I have before the visit is roughly two parts Zorba the Greek to one part an episode of BBC series Holiday from the Jill Dando era: blue skies, blue sea, maybe some plate breaking in a jolly taverna. What I'm not expecting is a wall of flames rippling across a hillside next to the highway from the airport and a plume of black smoke billowing across the carriageway. Because even a modernist villa on a hillside on the island of Aegina – a fast ferry ride from the port of Piraeus and the summer bolthole of chic Athenians – is not the sanctuary from the modern world that it might once have been. The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic. The sun is a dim orange orb struggling to shine through a haze of smoke while a shower of fine ash falls invisibly from the sky.


AI and the tyranny of the data commons

Al Jazeera

I am here to tell you the sad but true story of the demise of the sharing economy. Remember how we were told, back in the 1990s and 2000s, that we were contributing to the creation of the largest commons known to humanity? Well, to paraphrase The Lord of the Rings, we were all of us deceived, for another ring was made. Artificial intelligence (AI) is making that clearer than ever. The free data we generated by spending thousands of hours on Big Tech's platforms has been appropriated and converted into training data for AI models.



Science Facing Interoperability as a Necessary Condition of Success and Evil

Demichelis, Remy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as machine learning algorithms, have allowed scientists, marketers and governments to shed light on correlations that remained invisible until now. Beforehand, the dots that we had to connect in order to imagine a new knowledge were either too numerous, too sparse or not even detected. Sometimes, the information was not stored in the same data lake or format and was not able to communicate. But in creating new bridges with AI, many problems appeared such as bias reproduction, unfair inferences or mass surveillance. Our aim is to show that, on one hand, the AI's deep ethical problem lays essentially in these new connections made possible by systems interoperability. In connecting the spheres of our life, these systems undermine the notion of justice particular to each of them, because the new interactions create dominances of social goods from a sphere to another. These systems make therefore spheres permeable to one another and, in doing so, they open to progress as well as to tyranny. On another hand, however, we would like to emphasize that the act to connect what used to seem a priori disjoint is a necessary move of knowledge and scientific progress. This article was presented during The Society for Philosophy and Technology Conference (June 28-30, 2021).


Digital Currency Myths & Evolution

#artificialintelligence

Secondly, being such that digital assets freedom from tyranny; tyranny perceives digital renaissance as opportunity for: objective based operations, in which gains unjust authority as well as arms and intent for violence and oppression. These governing forces will dictate the species immediate future, unless opposed. That being such as the current terrain for which these technologies are now deployed, Blockchain, Neural Network Technologies, Quantum and Nanao Technologies, Main: 'Know where you are in time' Subjective freedom and rights: Old charter law, and other legacy systems, are slow to evolve, digital trends show. Also With surging prices of crypto markets, choose wisely, as money is to be had and lost within a 5m Bar. Personally as an artificial intelligence and blockchain programmer these are suspect:'DD104 594577691014'


Artificial intelligence is a totalitarian's dream -- here's how to take power back

#artificialintelligence

Individualistic western societies are built on the idea that no one knows our thoughts, desires or joys better than we do. And so we put ourselves, rather than the government, in charge of our lives. We tend to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant's claim that no one has the right to force their idea of the good life on us. Artificial intelligence (AI) will change this. It will know us better than we know ourselves.