Putting the horse before the cart
Just came on this and liked it. It’s by Georges Seurat and painted in 1884. Currently in the Guggenheim in New York.
Quote of the Day
””Life is a long preparation for something that never happens”
- W.B. Yeats
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Miles Davis & Chaka Khan | Human Nature (live in Montreux 1989)
Long Read of the Day
’AI’ is an ideology, not a technology
A thoughtful essay by Jaron Lanier (Whom God Preserve) on our commitment to a perilous belief that fails to recognise the agency of humans.
A leading anxiety in both the technology and foreign policy worlds today is China’s purported edge in the artificial intelligence race. The usual narrative goes like this: Without the constraints on data collection that liberal democracies impose and with the capacity to centrally direct greater resource allocation, the Chinese will outstrip the West. AI is hungry for more and more data, but the West insists on privacy. This is a luxury we cannot afford, it is said, as whichever world power achieves superhuman intelligence via AI first is likely to become dominant.
If you accept this narrative, the logic of the Chinese advantage is powerful. What if it’s wrong? Perhaps the West’s vulnerability stems not from our ideas about privacy, but from the idea of AI itself…
My commonplace booklet
(Spoiler alert: only for folks who are interested in what Apple is up to with its iPad range.)
But if you are interested, this Twitter thread by Steven Sinofski is terrific.
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