[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This Reader is about the brave new world that can, but should not control us. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—Today’s devices are becoming more rather than less complicated to use –and exercise increasing control over our time, our lives and our rights.
–By one reckoning, four to seven hours a day of screen time adds up to roughly fifteen years spent nose-to-glass by age seventy. The warning is not that phones are evil, it is that a life can be fully consumed without ever being lived, and no single moment will announce that it happened. (Liz Leatrice)
1. With such an overload, we can expect a tremendous loss of what passes as knowledge. As for me, I have way more texts and images than I can ever sort and organize effectively. But I try, and I try, and I…. “But I don’t get no satisfaction”, as the Rolling Stones sang. (Some call the extraction of our data (and our money) we are subjected-to in today’s info overload plague ‘the human fracking of the mind’).*
*: You know: Petroleum frackers pump, high pressure and high-volume detergents into the ground to force monetizable black gold (oil) to the surface.
2. Similarly,human frackers pump too much addictive information of little value to disrupt our minds. These frackers extract our personal data** —often selling this directly to advertisers –who then get us to purchase their products. What the frackers also get is our attention, namely our eyes on the screens, that diminishes our ability to think and to respond to what is happening around us (including human rights violations). Human fracking is a world-spanning land-grab into our consciousness. Some have called this ‘infobesity’ or‘infoxication’.
**: Big data harvesting/mining, and storing for self-interest use inevitably leads to the political power to define reality. Not even governments control it. Data is captured and commodified by a handful of actors who make trillions of dollars from it. (Jaime Breilh)
3. Governments and societies can tackle frackers by a) implementing national data minimization frameworks, b) deploying AI-driven filtering and summarization tools, as well as c) updating public education curricula to teach media literacy and critical thinking, together with d) advancing open-data transparency initiatives. But, any of this will clash with Capitalism’s endless drive for profits. In today’s turbulent world, such tactics present big challenges. But the alternative is either Huxley‘s Brave New World –a society controlled by pleasure, distraction and consumerism, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four –a dictatorial society that controls through pain, fear and scarcity. (S. Bezruchka)
It is now modern algorithms that act as the architects of the world’s collective memory
4. The capacity of these algorithms to store, organize, and relay information profoundly influences and impacts not just what is visible, but who is seen, who is accepted, or who is understood without a bias. Search engines often reinforce racial profiling and reinforce what they term ‘technological redlining’ whereby inequalities become encoded into information systems themselves. Digital histories (i.e., your/my digital histories), once encoded in algorithmic data sets, will define us as individuals long after we have changed in meaningful ways. As individuals, we lose the power to shape our own stories; we are trapped by past errors and are perpetually defined by damaging algorithmic traces that we cannot escape. The impact of algorithmic permanence weighs heaviest on young people***, all the way before they can understand the potential consequences of their early actions. (JJ White, Safiya Umoja Noble, Shannon Vallor)
***: I have read that, for the first time in history, young people do not want to change society —they want to exit it. (Roberto Savio)
In good part, because
Social media are now mostly anti-social (Ramesh Jaura)
5. Instead of people working together on common causes, we can anonymously bash other people and seemingly get pleasure, perhaps even causing considerable harm to others. What to do if this is the case? Reclaim our attention about the harm being caused? Perhaps, limit your exposure to speeding technology altogether? To start, do not multi-task; slow down. Become an attention activist or Homo Attentus.
6. To add insult to injury, repression is no longer only physical. It is increasingly digital, scalable, and automated. States have learned to turn the internet into a tool of surveillance and manipulation. Human rights are indispensable, precisely because the digital world is now where public life happens –and where it is being strangled. Communications and social media have replaced political participation. (Roberto Savio) The crisis beneath the crisis is credibility. When the powerful silence critics, they do not remove problems, they remove the needed alarms. The internet will not self-correct. It will follow spurious incentives unless societies impose guardrails. (R. Jaura)
[Note: I cannot but keep posting issues on AI since they are and will continue to be ‘the talk of the town’. Maybe, my selection will keep jumping among topics, but I promise it will be informative and will make you think critically].
7. Science’s New Engine. A single AI search can find every paper ever published in a field, synthesize insights across disciplines that no human has time to bridge, as well as run 6,000 biological experiments in the time a human researcher would run 30 –and all of this is happening right now, not in some projected future. The issue is not that AI is smart; it is that the bottleneck in science was never intelligence, it was bandwidth. Human scientists herd toward high-status problems, they cannot hold two literatures in their head at once –and furthermore need sleep! Artificial intelligence does not have any of those constraints, which means it is not augmenting science so much as rerouting it entirely, i.e., sweeping the long tail of unsolved problems that humanity just never got around to resolve. (Noahpinion)
8. Will AI and human capital operate as complements, making each other more productive? Or will they be substitutes? Economists have long recognized the importance of human capital, i.e., the skills and knowledge embedded in people. But recent advances in artificial intelligence have raised concerns about the displacement of human capital. Three critical components of human capital –curiosity, critical thinking and self-regulation– can help answer these difficult questions. A large-language model fed with all the information available until this moment will not be a substitute for the talent, creativity, and curiosity of future creators. Although AI may do a decent job recombining old data…it cannot mimic human creations yet unseen. (Pablo Peña) …and it cannot keep secrets, a unique human trait!
9.There was a pervasive assumption that bigger —and then bigger still— is the inevitable direction of AI. But the inputs needed for that path (super-computers, mega-energy, mega-data, mega-capital) collided with a simple truth: hyperscaling is not sustainable for most of the world. There are now two camps: the haves, and the rest of us. The gulf is real. So is the hunger for alternatives to be found and made available in the commons and in open access sources. (Mozilla)
10. The deeper shift is not about AI replacing developers. The shift is about moving the required skill from ‘writing code’ to, what is much more important, ‘describing things clearly and precisely’ –which happens to be territory that human writers, editors and domain experts already occupy and will continue to occupy. (Techdirt)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City:
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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Postscript/Marginalia
-Do Not Disturb
Every buzz, ping, and blip from a social media notification interrupts your cognitive processing for roughly seven seconds and, since most people’s phones are within a foot of their body at all times, that adds up fast into a day of spliced attention. A growing group of people have decided the obvious solution is to simply leave their phones on ‘Do Not Disturb permanently’, i.e., not silencing notifications during meetings or workouts, but as a permanent, default state of existence. The tricky part is not the silence itself, it is the social contract it violates, since most people have quietly agreed to be reachable at all times –and opting out reads as rude until you explain yourself. Tell the people who matter what you are doing and why and, most of them come around quickly, even if they are still a little annoyed. (Wired)
-Boredom and Creativity
Your best ideas are not hiding in your phone. They are hiding in the discomfort you keep escaping. Creativity scores have been falling since 1990 and the culprit is relentless stimulation. Research shows creativity is three times more predictive of career success than IQ, yet we have systematically engineered it out of our lives by filling every idle moment with a screen. The problem is not just screen time; it is that, when people try to cut back, they swap one screen for another, never allowing boredom to do its actual job. Boredom is an ancient cognitive signal, one that pulls attention inward, one that lets the mind wander to let ideas surface. The shower insight, the long-walk breakthrough, the answer that arrives unexpectedly, these are not accidents; they are what happens when the brain is finally left alone. The fix is simple and uncomfortable: Twenty minutes, no input, no escape. Just sit with the itch until something useful emerges. (Two Percentage) A flashback in memory: “I am a big believer in boredom. All the technology stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful too”. (Steve Jobs)