Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. For those coming back for a Little League World Series update, Sam’s team won their first game 10-0, and will play on Monday at 3 pm EST. Here’s a fun video of Sam hitting an RBI single to right, with a surprise appearance from yours truly — watch until the end!
Okay, on to more Untangled-y things: I’ve been thinking about how the public discourse on artificial intelligence compares to crypto. One commonality? The way we talk about the underlying technology hides power and people making decisions. In crypto, the narrative of ‘technical decentralization’ promised to decentralize power but only hid it. Despite the underlying technology, power continued to concentrate in intermediaries, voting and governance, token ownership, coordinated decision-making, computing power, and in informal authority.
Somehow, we’ve come to talk about ‘AI’ as if it is ‘intelligent,’ ‘autonomous,’ and engag…
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