🗞️ AI is a 'public problem'; The surveillance AI pipeline; and 'Fauxmation.'
Read to the end for a thought experiment about AI and crypto.
Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter about technology and power. This month:
🧠 I published the essay, “Synthetic social media: Internet users, brace for the emergence of E-Swift.”
🤗 I shared a personal letter to my nephew and enlisted you in shaping the future of Untangled.
🗞️ I Untangled the News — once, and today makes number two.
💁♂️ I revamped the ‘About’ page. Check it out!
📚I published an updated version of AI Untangled, my first Tiny Book. Today is the last day you can buy it for the price of a fancy coffee ($5).
Now on to the show, where I contextualize research and news about:
🌍 How to make generative AI a ‘public problem.’
🦾 ‘Fauxmation’ and the historical impact of AI on labor.
🔍 The surveillance AI pipeline and the supposed neutrality of scientific research.
I conclude by sharing some links and a thought experiment about AI and crypto. See you down there 👇
🌍 In “To Reckon with Generative AI, Make It a Public Problem,” USC professor Mike Ananny offers a unique, useful, and might I say, Untangled-y way of approaching generative AI: as a public problem. A public problem might not affect you personally but requires our collective consideration because, as Ananny writes, it shapes “what it means to be a thriving person in a thriving society.” Generative AI is a public problem because at a fundamental level, “It is a system of relationships between people and machines that creates language, makes mistakes, and needs to be systematically cared for.”
We tend to assume that so-called ‘tech problems’ are principally about technology. But if you’re a loyal Untangled reader, you’ll rightly holler, “There’s no such thing as a ‘tech problem.’” Touché! if we start instead from the assumption that technology is entangled in social systems, then ‘tech problems’ are part social, part cultural, part political, part economic, etc. Anyway, because we misdiagnose the problem, we privatize it and hand over the keys to technologists and tech companies. That’s why I find Ananny’s framing so powerful. If generative AI is a public problem — and I believe that it is — then, as he writes, it must be “collectively debated, accounted for, and managed.”
👉 If you want to dig into these ideas more deeply:
Listen to my podcast episode with Ananny, called “What’s really happening when an algorithm makes a mistake.”
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