If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.
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If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.
But - as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect - there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:
The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" - instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:
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The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):
When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.
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Rather, they are calculating that they have so much market power that they can sell whatever slop the AI makes, and pay less for the AI license than they would make for a human artist's work. As is the case in every industry, AI can't do an artist's job, but an AI salesman can convince an artist's boss to fire the creative worker and replace them with AI:
Cigna - like all private health insurers - has two contradictory imperatives:
I. To keep its customers healthy; and
II. To make as much money for its shareholders as is possible.
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That was the case with Amazon's Grab and Go stores where, supposedly, AI-enabled cameras counted up all the things you put in your shopping basket and automatically billed you for them. In reality, the cameras were connected to Indian call-centers where low-waged workers made those assessments:
Welcome to the 17th Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:
In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":
Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?
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So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":
Oh wow, I really didn't think I'd see an example of "oops, AI did this by mistake, no one else is at fault" so fast after reading this article yesterday. Well, maybe it is the other way round, here they claim AI did it itself, the article is more about humans having to correct AI to make it look like AI is working perfectly...
On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:
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Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores ( gizmodo.com )
Nine digitally altered female MP into 'more revealing' outfit ( www.abc.net.au )
oh dear. i thought it was a belt, not the addition of a mid rift top......
shocked that the Carlin "AI" special was actually just written by the asshole. Imagine being ghost writer for an AI. ( www.nytimes.com )
archive: https://archive.is/4xnjk