Month: January 2018

Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention

Source: Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention

There is a war for your attention, and like all adversarial scenarios, the sides develop new countermeasures and then new tactics to overcome those countermeasures.
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The attention wars have real consequences for our daily lives. The entire fake news/Facebook ad/Twitter bot scandal is but a skirmish in the wider attention war, albeit one with global geopolitical (and potentially thermo­nuclear) consequences.
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But history is littered with armies of seemingly invincible attention warriors who were out-evolved by their prey, and could not overcome the counter­measures that were begat by repeated exposure to their once-undefeatable tactics.

Against the synchronous society, by Artjoms Iškovs

Source: Against the synchronous society, by Artjoms Iškovs

It’s alarming how often society seems to hinge on people being in the same place at the same time, doing the same things. The drawbacks of this are immense: infrastructure has to be overprovisioned for any bursty load pattern and being inside of a bursty load pattern results in higher waiting times and isn’t a pleasant experience for everyone involved. Hence it’s important to investigate why this happens and whether this is always required. … Why are people doing this to themselves?

does the weekend really have to happen at the same time for all people?
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In professional services, in most cases, the client doesn’t care when the service is being performed. … Fixed work hours make no sense since it’s not time the client is buying, it’s the result. Knowledge work isn’t predicated on people having to do it at the same time or even at a given time.
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Do we still need offices?
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Do all meetings have to happen at the same place or at the same time?
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From a cultural point of view, public holidays are amazing. From a logistical point of view, they’re a nightmare. If everybody is having a holiday, nobody is, and the fact that everyone is observing the holiday at the same time yet again creates usage peaks in all sorts of places.
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There are still planes in January, but they’re… emptier. And airports aren’t such an unpleasant experience.

Raise AIs like parents, not programmers—or they’ll turn into terrible toddlers

Source: Raise AIs like parents, not programmers—or they’ll turn into terrible toddlers

Creating a safe AI is not that different than raising a decent human. … We can apply some important lessons we teach to young humans to how we govern AI:

  1. Keep an open mind
  2. Be fair
  3. Be kind

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Like human brains, machine-learning algorithms assess how to act based on past experiences: They create decision pathways based on the data they have seen. If the data they’re exposed to is limited, their understanding of the real-time information they process will be, too.
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Our ability to trust is underpinned by fairness. It is so essential that children as young as four will detect and react to unfairness. But in order to verify fairness, one must have access to the decisions that are being made. … The answer was produced in what’s referred to as a “black box”: an electronic system completely closed to analysis or inspection. This dismissive “because I said so” approach does not build a sense of fairness or trust in either AI or children. … AI needs to not only produce, but also explain the answer it creates.
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Understanding the process of decision-making is necessary but not alone sufficient—sometimes we need to improve the rules that we follow in the first place. This requires two key traits: empathy and imagination. … AI needs to learn the same skills.

We need a super-Turing test that reflects humanity as we want it to be when it grows up: not just human, but one that is kind, fair, and has an open mind.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail – John Salvatier

Source: Reality has a surprising amount of detail, by John Salvatier

This turns out to explain why its so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field. … At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences.
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You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
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You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
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This surprising amount of detail is is not limited to “human” or “complicated” domains, it is a near universal property of everything from space travel to sewing, to your internal experience of your own mind.

you might think ‘So what? I guess things are complicated but I can just notice the details as I run into them; no need to think specifically about this’. And if you are doing things that are relatively simple, things that humanity has been doing for a long time, this is often true. But if you’re trying to do difficult things, things which are not known to be possible, it is not true.

The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success. You might hope that these surprising details are irrelevant to your mission, but not so. Some of them will end up being key.
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You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead. … Another way to see that noticing the right details is hard, is that different people end up noticing different details.
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Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.
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If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived.