evgeny on ai

via evgeny tweet [https://x.com/evgenymorozov/status/1808399074447511647]:

Paywall-free version of my FT Weekend essay on the AI we could have had [https://archive.is/JIl5B]

[this was jul 2024 – then in dec 2024 – evgeny on ai take 2]

notes/quotes:

The AI we could have had – july 2024 – by Evgeny Morozov

The society, a nexus of academics, spies, policymakers and businesspeople, was dreamt up a few years earlier by a CIA operative. It was designed to counter the USSR’s growing clout in computing and mastery of “cybernetics”, the precursor to today’s artificial intelligence. Consensus in the US of the late 1960s was fractured by foreign and domestic conflicts, but cybernetics promised to reassert control, deploying computers to tame the chaos and make life predictable again. The man from Control Data Corp, himself a CIA confidant, was there that day to sell a plan for what he called “communal information centers”, to make CDC’s supercomputers serve the public by providing news, recipes, public health monitoring, even dating advice. Computers, he told the audience, were going to be our “willing slaves . . . employed in the service of mankind”.

carhart-harris entropy law et al

graeber violence in care law

While the era of personal computing, tablets and smart appliances was still a distant dream, it was a period of intense excitement and experimentation. It is hard to imagine now, but in 1968 the basic question of what computers were actually for had no obvious answer.

still have no legit answer

mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh

ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

were computers really destined to be mere slaves, condemned to an eternity of performing repetitive tasks? Or could they be something more? Could they evolve into craftsmen? While slaves unerringly obey commands, craftsmen have the freedom to explore and even challenge directives. The finest craftsmen do more than just fulfil orders; they educate and enlighten, expanding our horizons through their skill and creativity. Johnson and Brodey wanted to wrest control away from those eager to mass-produce an army of subservient machines

if only we had that insight for humans..

To bring their vision to life, in late 1967 they had established a clandestine, privately funded lab on Boston’s waterfront, aiming to personalise computing nearly a decade before Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had the same idea. Their vision was bold, utopian and radical. Had they succeeded in swaying their peers, the tech we use today would look remarkably different.

*Their vision of computing was not about prediction or automation. The tech they were building was supposed to expand our horizons. **Instead of trusting a computer to recommend a film based on our viewing history, they wanted us to discover and appreciate genres we might have avoided before. ***Their tech would make us more sophisticated, discerning and complex, rather than passive consumers of generative AI-produced replicas of Mozart, Rembrandt or Shakespeare.

*best/only was to expand our horizons – if realize tech w/o judgment for ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling

**how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition where we’d gather/connect per unconditional data from itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday

**we just need to be more free.. to do/be/see the dance

Over the past decade, I’ve tried to unravel the legacy of Brodey, Johnson and their lab. This June, I launched a podcast delving deeper into their story. My journey took me from Geneva to Boston, to Ottawa, to Oslo, where I hoped to recover an idiosyncratic, humanistic and largely forgotten vision..t I wanted to understand when and how our digital culture veered off course.

idiosyncrasy we need – idiosyncratic jargon via self-talk as data (aka: itch-in-the-soul).. to connect us via nonjudgmental expo labeling

What I discovered was that the types of interactivity, smartness and intelligence that are baked into the gadgets we use every day are not the only kinds available. What we now consider inevitable and natural features of the digital landscape are in fact the result of fierce power struggles between opposing schools of thought. With hindsight, we know that Silicon Valley ultimately embraced the more conservative path. The Homo technologicus it produced mirrors the Homo economicus of modern economics, valuing rationality and consistency, discouraging flexibility, fluidity and chance. Today’s personalised tech systems, once the tools of mavericks, are more likely to narrow our opportunities for creativity than expand them..t

any form of m\a\p does that

Sparling met Oser the next day at 10am, and their conversation lasted until 2am. Gradually, the details emerged. “He wanted to fund an 18-month experiment with a lab of four to six people from diverse academic backgrounds,” Sparling said. What for? Something to do with expanding the “ecology of thinking”, a concept that initially perplexed her. Ecology is the study of the interconnectedness and diversity of living systems,.t “but I didn’t understand how that would ever relate to anything we could experiment with”, she said. Yet experiment they did.

need ai as augmenting interconnectedness.. a legit different experiment.. and we’re missing it

It turned out there was *a way for technology and ecology to coexist after all. The secret was the concept of “responsiveness”..t Early, more conservative strands of cybernetics had fixated on the simple model of the adaptive thermostat, marvelling at its ability to maintain a preset temperature in a room. Our modern-day smart-home systems, which intuit our preferences and automate everything, quietly adapting to our needs, are just fancier versions of this idea.

from previous para ‘Ecology is the study of the interconnectedness and diversity of living systems‘

*need a way about quick/positive (ie: exponential labeling)ness.. but more/too about nonjudgmental ness.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p for the eco dance to dance

The lab also boasted its own quasi-patron saint, Marshall McLuhan, the influential media theorist and friend of Brodey’s who had once visited. McLuhan promoted the idea of the “anti-environment”: distinctive spaces that illuminate overlooked elements of our everyday surroundings. The types of spaces, McLuhan would say, that “tell fish about the water”. The lab was one such anti-environment, promising to *jolt its visitors out of the numbing uniformity of their everyday world. Everything was meant to shock, provoke and stimulate..t

*just need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening for that.. no need to shock/provoke/stimulate.. just listen

Visitors to 33 Lewis Wharf likened the experience to the mind-expanding effects of psychedelic drugs. Upon entering through an imposing metal door, visitors were confronted with huge, floor-to-ceiling cellophane bags suspended from above. These bags, equipped with sensors, would inflate and contract, demanding effort to push between them. Once past this barrier, the bewildered guests found themselves disoriented by an eclectic collection of objects. Two bulky, expensive computers, bristling with wires, stood out. The back half of a Ford car was a favourite place for brainstorming sessions. A giant glass dome resembling a bell jar served as a space for private conversations and, occasionally, for smoking dope (it was the 1960s, after all). And that’s not to mention the paintings, the musical instruments and the various other strange materials, including a giant slab of foam.

oi.. just need city sketchup ness

Unlike some critics of Big Tech today, they did not champion a return to vintage or “dumb” tech. Instead, they envisioned a kind of digital smartness that remains almost unimaginable to us today. They saw people as fickle and ever-changing, qualities they did not view as flaws. .. “There is no ideal anything, because we are constantly changing. We’re not like machines.”

graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al

He is right; machines we aren’t. But *the wrong technologies can make us machine-like. And maybe they have. Perhaps this is the root of our discomfort about the direction of the digital revolution: that **rather than making machines more human, it is making people more mechanical. Speaking at a 1967 conference, Brodey minced no words: “man becomes captured, captured behind the grid of what can be programmed into the machine . . . We have been captured by automobiles, by houses, by architecture, simplified to the ***point of unresponsiveness.”

*ie: tech (or people) with any form of m\a\p

**neither is helpful.. we don’t want/need machines more human.. we need to use them for their non human traits ie: nonjudgmental ness.. exponentialness.. et al

**but responsiveness.. any form of re ness.. is cancerous distraction to the dance

The maddening efficiency of our digital slaves has obscured the idea that human agency depends on constant course correction. As Brodey noted in 1970, “Choice is not intellectual. It’s made by doing, by exploring, by finding out what you like as you go along.”..t

i wouldn’t call .. legit as you go along ness.. choice.. i’d call that curiosity over decision making.. decision making is unmooring us law et al

Sparling told me that a key question driving the lab’s work was, “What can we discover that allows the person in the loop to learn and progress with whatever they are trying to do?” The common thread uniting projects such as the dancing suit and the restraint blanket, she said, was their celebration of improvised learning — jazz style — as the core value that should underpin interactive tech.

will only happen if nonjudgmental ness.. if unconditional ness

“Imagine a future where your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper, catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalised summary.”

oi.. whalespeak .. whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world

This visionary idea comes from the 1995 bestseller, Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte, who was once a protégé of Brodey. Negroponte is renowned for co-founding the MIT Media Lab, which he describes as a technological Bauhaus, blending art and computing. His work there profoundly influenced the digital revolution. He once joked about the Media Lab’s opening: “Our speaker was Steve Jobs, our caterer was Martha Stewart . . . I told both of them that we launched their careers.”

nicholas negroponte – olpc et al.. steve jobs

Negroponte, an early supporter and columnist for the techno-utopian Wired magazine, had a knack for outlandish visions of the future that resonated with his readers. He came up with a name for his newspaper-reading curatorial assistant, “The Daily Me”. He fantasised about its ability to “mix headline news with ‘less important’ stories relating to acquaintances, people you will see tomorrow, and places you are about to go or have just come from”. To a reader in 2024, it sounds a lot like the social media feeds we have come to love and hate, which function as reliably as any thermostat, their dependability rooted in the constant observation of our behaviour.

By 1995, Negroponte had fully capitulated to the idea that human curiosity can be assessed, predicted and satisfied by clever programming, with a touch of algorithmically injected serendipity in the mix. This belief was the unifying theme of his work at the Media Lab.

oi

Disillusioned, Brodey left the US, his five children and his ex-wife in 1973. He moved to Norway and lived as a Maoist. Within a few years, he was writing letters to his friend Marshal McLuhan from an iron foundry, where he took work as a manual labourer. His political awakening had led him to a hard truth: the diversity of choice that his lab had championed was not something that could be achieved through technology alone..t

more because choice ness itself isn’t diverse enough.. tech could facil the seeming chaos of 8b legit free people.. for (blank)’s sake

Despite the lab’s failure, Johnson and Brodey’s insights carry an important message. If we want technology that expands our choices, we must recognise that someone has to fund it,..t much as our governments fund public education or arts and culture. Achieving this on a massive scale would require an effort comparable with the one that initiated the welfare state.

need: sabbatical ish transition

because 10-day-care-center\ness et al

Perhaps Johnson and Brodey should have read the room back in 1968. After hijacking the podium and explaining their vision, they invited anyone interested to “come on, come up and stand here”. Only two people did. One of them, an elderly gentleman in a bow tie, a cybernetics grandee and former psychiatrist, only stepped up on to the stage to restore order. He reassured anyone interested in joining the cybernetic hippies that they could do so at lunch the next day, provided they promised not to throw any food. And so, the first — and last — cybernetic rebellion came to an end. It was a shortlived affair, but its lesson is clear: a tech with which we can truly interact is still a distant dream.

again.. what we need most – tech w/o judgment.. ie: tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling

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