“When I think of all the things I’ve worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it’s plain that I’ve been scared of the wrong things.”
— Anathem
Category Archives: Books
Giving up on time
“He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o’clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o’clock in the morning — some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time — now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.”
— Wicked Prey (John Sandford)
Production-line Education
Reply
“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt.”
“So what next?”
“The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clearsighted. Do you feel like running down the street crying “The apocalypse is upon us”? Try tellng yourself, “No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”
— 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari)
Seven Stages of Robot Replacement
- A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.
- [Later] OK, it can do a lot of this tasks, but it can’d do everything I do.
- [Later] Okay, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.
- [Later] OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.
- [Later] OK,OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.
- [Later] Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more interesting and pays more!
- [Later] I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possible do what I do now.
[Repeat]
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly (2016)
The End of the World
But here in the calm latitudes of this room
I am thinking that the end could be less operatic.
Maybe a black tarpaulin, a kind of boat cover,
could be lowered over the universe one night.
A hand could enter the picture and crumple the cosmos
into a ball of paper and hook it into a waste basket.
A gigantic door might close. A horrible bell could ring.
We could have fire, ice, bang, and whimper all at once.
— Excerpt from one of the poems from The Art of Drowning
Video
“It’s hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speelycaptor (video recorder) at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”
— ANATHEM (Neal Stephenson)
To die of old age (Carl Hiaasen – Basket Case)
My first blog post back in 2002 was a quote from Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case. I’m rereading the book for the umpteenth time and came across the following which… resonates.
“Early on I made up my mind not to die of anything but old age. Stopped smoking because I was afraid of the cancer. Swore off booze because I was scared of driving my car into a tree. Gave up hunting because I was scared of blowing my own head off. Quit chasing trim because I was afraid of being murdered by a jealous husband. Shaved the odds, is what I set out to do. Missed out on a ton of fun, but that’s all right. All my friends are planted in the ground and here I am!”
Facebook: The Inside Story
I’m at a loss for what to say about Steven Levy’s book, Facebook: The Inside Story. At 500 pages it’s a deep dive into the history of Facebook (the startup and all that’s happened since). The excerpts below are just a few of the things that caught my eye. It would be a mistake to judge the book (or Mark Zuckerberg) based on the passages I underlined.
Soley by analyzing Likes, they successfully determined whether someone was straight or gay 88 percent of the time. In nineteen out of twenty cases, they could figure out whether one was white or African American. And they were 85 percent correct in guessing one’s political party. Even by clicking innocuous subjects, people were stripping themselves naked. […] In subsequent months,Kosinski and Stillwell would improve their prediction methods and publish a paper that claimed that using Likes alone, a researcher could know someone better than the people who worked with, grew up with, or even married that person. “Computer models need 10, 70, 150, and 300 Likes, respectively, to outperform an average work colleague, cohabitant or friend, family member, and spouse.”
A 2012 study found that Facebook was mentioned in a third of divorces.
It was a natural evolution to put (content moderators) in factories. They became the equivalent of digital janitors, cleaning up the News Feed like the shadow workforce that comes at night and sweeps the floors when the truly valued employees are home sleeping. Not a nice picture. And this kind of cleaning could be harrowing, with daily exposure to rapes, illegal surgery, and endless images of genitals.
Between January and March 2019, (Facebook) blocked 2 billion attempts to open fake accounts — almost as many as actual users on the system. […] The company concedes that around 5 percent of active accounts are fake. That’s well over 100 million.
It’s left to the 15,000 or so content moderators to actually determine what stuff crosses the line, forty seconds at a time. In Phoenix (site of one of the moderator “factories”) I asked the moderators I was interviewing whether they felt that artificial intelligence could ever do their jobs. The room burst out in laughter.
A computer-science teacher at one of the big AI schools told me that Facebook used to be the top employment choice. Now he guesses that about 30 percent of his students won’t consider it, for moral reasons.
“We’ve actually built an AI that’s more powerful than the human mind and we hid it from all of society by calling it something else,” Harris says. “By calling it the Facebook News Feed, no one noticed that we’d actually built an AI that’s completely run loose and out of control.” Harris says that using the News Feed is like fighting an unbeatable computer chess player—it knows your weaknesses and beats you every time.” — Tristan Harris (former Google interface engineer)
A few take-aways:
- Facebook might be the most powerful (influential) organization in the world. And therefore — potentially — the most dangerous.
- Everyone on the planet is affected by what Facebook does (or doesn’t do). Even those of us without accounts.
- Mark Zuckerberg is brilliant and has surrounded himself with other brilliant people. He seems to believe he is always the smartest person in the room.
- Zuckerberg is on a mission to save/change the world. Combined with the above, this makes him very dangerous.
- People who use Facebook (and those of us who do not) have no idea the extent to which we are influenced by the people running the platform.
- Users will never —voluntarily — stop using Facebook.
The book has left me a bit shaken. I always considered religion — some religion — the greatest danger to humanity. Facebook seems a greater threat.
“An existential threat to humanity”
The following quote is from Steven Levy’s new book, Facebook: The Inside Story.
“We’ve actually built an AI that’s more powerful than the human mind and we hid it from all of society by calling it something else,” Harris says. “By calling it the Facebook News Feed, no one noticed that we’d actually built an AI that’s completely run loose and out of control.” Harris says that using the News Feed is like fighting an unbeatable computer chess player—it knows your weaknesses and beats you every time.”
— Tristan Harris (former Google interface engineer)