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Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
The Automation Paradox is that the better our machines get, the more we struggle when they fail. When heading out for a hike in the woods, it's tempting to skip the map and compass and rely on our phones and apps for navigation. Yet when we encounter no signal or lose power, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation. Or perhaps, like me, you've come to rely on popping your destination into the satnav or Google Maps whenever you get in the car and have nearly forgotten the ability to navigate without it. These situations illustrate the paradox of automation, where the more sophisticated and automated our machines and technologies become, the more bewildered we find ourselves when they inevitably fail. Or: the smarter the machines get, the dumber we might get. In his book Messy, Tim Harford suggests three strands to the paradox as our machines get more sophisticated: Automation covers up our mistakes, hiding our incompetence, meaning we may not learn to correct ourselves—consider autocorrect cleaning up our typos as we go. When we rely on automation, we get less practice for our skills, so even highly skilled individuals may find their expertise diminishing—perhaps you've found yourself using your phone calculator for a trivial calculation. When the easy scenarios are taken care of, failures may occur in complex or unpredictable ways that we may find especially difficult to recover from—like a subtle but persistent failure in the steering of a passenger plane, recovering from a skid on an icy road, or when you're deeply lost in the wilderness. More sophisticated technology can even make it useless or more dangerous when it fails. Older cars used to be reparable forever. Now, if your vehicle fails, it's likely to need plugging in at the dealership to figure out what's up. How many electronic devices are thrown away because somewhere inside, some tiny loose connection or component makes the whole thing worthless? Were pilots and flight crews better prepared and able to improvise before the autopilot became ubiquitous? I often wish our devices would fail more like an escalator or an electric toothbrush. If an escalator fails, you can still walk up it. If your electric toothbrush dies, you can still use it to brush your teeth. These could be called Technology-Enhanced Products, perhaps. But when most of our devices die, they're often rendered worthless. Automation and sophisticated machines help me so much. I did use Grammarly to help check this post. I use Google Maps nearly every time I put in my destination to home, and I often use a calculator to check my maths. But I do pay attention to grammar corrections, bring a paper map when I can, and keep trying to do the maths in my head. But as Tim Harford explains it, we still face "the paradox of automation: the better the machines get, the more bewildered we are when the machines fail." Also see: The bus factor Normalisation of deviance Chaos monkey Know your tech Jevon's paradox The law of unintended consequences The Dunning-Kruger effect (send me proof of purchase of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and I'll send the sketch to you) More paradoxes: The coastline paradox The transparency paradox The Abilene paradox The paradox of choice The liar paradox Tolkein-style landscape inspired by the excellent Lord of Maps.
·sketchplanations.com·
Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
The Power of Language
The Power of Language
And your free copy of 'A Glossary for the Appreciation of Life: Part One (A-K)'
·erinremblance.substack.com·
The Power of Language
Daniel Schmachtenberger: “Silicon Dreams and Carbon Nightmares: The Wide Boundary Impacts of AI” | The Great Simplification
Daniel Schmachtenberger: “Silicon Dreams and Carbon Nightmares: The Wide Boundary Impacts of AI” | The Great Simplification
Episode 132
Artificial intelligence has been advancing at a break-neck pace. Accompanying this is an almost frenzied optimism that AI will fix our most pressing global problems, particularly when it comes to the hype surrounding climate solutions.In this episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger joins Nate to take a wide-boundary look at the true environmental risks embedded within the current promises of artificial intelligence. He demonstrates that the current trajectory of AI’s impact is headed towards ecological destruction, rather than restoration… an important narrative currently missing from the discourse surrounding AI at large. What are the environmental implications of a tool with unbound computational capabilities aimed towards goals of relentless growth and extraction? How could artificial intelligence play into the themes of power and greed, intensifying inequalities and accelerating the fragmentation of society? What role could AI play under a different set of values and expectations for the future that are in service to the betterment of life?
·thegreatsimplification.com·
Daniel Schmachtenberger: “Silicon Dreams and Carbon Nightmares: The Wide Boundary Impacts of AI” | The Great Simplification
It’s Just Two Degrees
It’s Just Two Degrees
We cannot let this fever run its course
·planetcritical.com·
It’s Just Two Degrees
Stop using AI to make boring stuff fast
Stop using AI to make boring stuff fast
When I first used Dall-E in January 2021, I input some text, I think it was a resin chair inspired by a cactus (I had Gaetano Pesce on my mind). It gave me an output that genuinely rocked me. I was testing this mental model that many people have for image generation that it’s basically just collaging existing images together and I realised fast that this was a very bad mental model. The first output blew my mind because it was so unexpected; It created a lot of detail within the image that I didn’t imagine when I wrote the prompt, which I could never find with a search engine. It had interpreted my prompt in a what I perceived as a
·ferguslaidlaw.substack.com·
Stop using AI to make boring stuff fast
Spatial Computing - Tega Brain et al. - All that is Air Melts into Air
Spatial Computing - Tega Brain et al. - All that is Air Melts into Air
The goal is fungibility—to assert equivalence between activities by people or environments so that emissions created over here can be traded and (theoretically) compensated for by actions removing or reducing carbon over there. The means is, of course, commodification. Offsets privatize planetary metabolism.
·e-flux.com·
Spatial Computing - Tega Brain et al. - All that is Air Melts into Air
AI Has Become a Technology of Faith
AI Has Become a Technology of Faith
Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington told me that they believe generative AI can help millions of suffering people. I’m not so sure.
·theatlantic.com·
AI Has Become a Technology of Faith
Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
Nearly every iceberg you see in a picture or diagram is probably floating the wrong way. This was what I learned (from Megan Thompson-Munson) after sketching Biz Stone's brilliant saying about the myth of overnight success. With some approximation, the density of ice is around 900 kg/m3, and seawater is around 1,000 kg/m3. Therefore, the fraction of an iceberg that's submerged is around ~900/1000 or 0.9. So, about 90% of an iceberg is below the surface and 10% above, which is partly why they can be so dangerous. While most iceberg pictures get this part more or less correct, most of these icebergs will be floating vertically. In reality, a tall, thin iceberg will likely topple, so most icebergs end up floating on their side, not their tips, even though we rarely draw them this way. I remember learning about a fascinating experiment with children of different ages estimating which glass holds more water: a tall, slender one filled high or a wider glass filled to a lower level. Younger children almost always chose the glass with the higher water level as the most water, even when it was significantly less than the shorter and wider glass. I wonder if it's part of why we draw icebergs vertically, at least when we're using them as a metaphor. It's easier to grasp quantities vertically, and we commonly underestimate volume spread over a wider area. We may still want to draw our icebergs tall and deep to make our point, but now, at least, we can do so with the knowledge that they're not like the real ones. If you want to see it yourself, Joshua Tauberer made a brilliant draw-an-iceberg-and-see-how-it-will-float game. I recommend you give it a go so it sinks in forever (sorry). Also see: Overnight success Why ice doesn't sink Ice-cream, gelato, sorbet Know your poles: penguins or polar bears, frozen ice or land
·sketchplanations.com·
Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
MIT researchers introduce generative AI for databases
MIT researchers introduce generative AI for databases
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed an easy-to-use tool that enables someone to perform complicated statistical analyses on tabular data using just a few keystrokes. Their method combines probabilistic AI models with the programming language SQL to provide faster and more accurate results than other methods.
·news.mit.edu·
MIT researchers introduce generative AI for databases
Including user interaction in website carbon estimates
Including user interaction in website carbon estimates
This post explores one way developers can go beyond page load and start estimating web page carbon emissions that include user interactions on the page.
·fershad.com·
Including user interaction in website carbon estimates
A Rant about Front-end Development
A Rant about Front-end Development
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views expressedRead More
·blog.frankmtaylor.com·
A Rant about Front-end Development