What I highlighted the week of June 19, 2023
Articles
"Why Do Movies Feel So Different now"
This video essay by Thomas Fligth was a great description and discussion of modernity, postmodernity, hyper- and metamodernity in film over the last 50 years. It captured a lot of what made "Top Gun: Maverick" feel like a breath of fresh air and what made "Everything Everywhere All At Once" so successful.
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We live in an anemic period of capitalism in which excessive returns are hard to come by unless you engage in exploitative labor practices, self-dealing among friends, frenzied lobbying aimed at shredding regulations, political projects aiming to privatize what’s left of the commons, or geopolitical strategies that aim to protect a dying empire’s dominance from ascendant powers.
The Nation, under Bhaskar Sunkara, has been publishing some interesting things. This piece had a long section on the relationship between venture capital and American hegemony on the global stage which I found less compelling, but otherwise is chock full of interesting data and commentary about the failures of venture capital and the lack of rigor on the part of the defenders of the Silicon Valley model of innovation and investment.
"The Godfathers of AI are at war"
Other experts echo Hinton’s disquiet. One of them is Yoshua Bengio, with whom Geoffrey Hinton shared the 2018 Turing Award. On 31 May, Bengio told the BBC that he feels “lost” over his life’s work. “It is challenging, emotionally speaking,” he said, as researchers are increasingly unsure how to “stop these systems or to prevent damage”.
I found the amount of emotional language quoted in this piece about Hinton, Bengio, LeCun and other AI leaders to be notable. More emotional language than I'm used to in coverage about AGI, existential risk and such topics.
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You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run. Duhaime reached back farther for a comparison, a digital version of the transition from craftsmen to industrial manufacturing: coherent processes broken into tasks and arrayed along assembly lines with some steps done by machines and some by humans but none resembling what came before.
When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.
An excellent piece in NYMag about how much human labor is behind most current AI models and the development of the next generation of models. This piece had some of the most believable descriptions of AI led job disruption that I've come across in recent coverage, which tends to be too doomy or boostery for my taste. This piece felt more grimey and tactile, which tends to match the lived experience of work for most human beings.
"Everyone Says Social Media Is Bad for Teens. Proving It Is Another Thing.""
It’s not about monitoring certain apps, said Caleb T. Carr, a professor of communication at Illinois State: “Instead, parents should engage with their kids. Just like parents did pre-social media, talk about being good humans and citizens, talk about respect for others and themselves, and talk about how their day was.
Helpful compendium of the kinds of research happening in psych and sociology about the effects of social media on kids that paints a much more complicated picture of the relationship between social media and kids' mental health and the kind of picture Haidt and Twenge tend to paint.
Movies
- I laughed a lot and very hard at "John Early: Now More Than Ever", the latest special from John Early. Early, Kate Berland and Jacqueline Novak are maybe the best comedians working these days.
TV Shows
- We started a rewatch of "High Maintenance" and it's just such a good show. So much to reminisce and wince about 2010s Brooklyn. S2E1 about election night in 2016 was as excellent as I remembered.
Books
- Thanks to this NYT piece about the recurring popularity of Norman Rush's 1990s novel Mating I picked up the novel earlier this week and have been really enjoying it.
