Counting Ghosts
Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.
This article is spot-on!
Tags: ethics
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Tuesday, September 26th, 2023
Thursday, September 21st, 2023
Statement on Generative AI | Ben Myers
I endorse this statement.
Tuesday, September 19th, 2023
I don’t want your data – Manu
I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.
Same!
Simon’s rule
I got a nice email from someone regarding my recent posts about performance on The Session. They said:
I hope this message finds you well. First and foremost, I want to express how impressed I am with the overall performance of https://thesession.org/. It’s a fantastic resource for music enthusiasts like me.
How nice! I responded, thanking them for the kind words.
They sent a follow-up clarification:
Awesome, anyway there was an issue in my message.
The line ‘It’s a fantastic resource for music enthusiasts like me.’ added by chatGPT and I didn’t notice.
I imagine this is what it feels like when you’re on a phone call with someone and towards the end of the call you hear a distinct flushing sound.
I wrote back and told them about Simon’s rule:
I will not publish anything that takes someone else longer to read than it took me to write.
That just feels so rude!
I think that’s a good rule.
Wednesday, May 31st, 2023
Future-first design thinking
If we’re serious about creating a sustainable future, perhaps we should change this common phrase from “Form follows Function” to “Form – Function – Future”. While form and function are essential considerations, the future, represented by sustainability, should be at the forefront of our design thinking. And actually, if sustainability is truly at the forefront of the way we create new products, then maybe we should revise the phrase even further to “Future – Function – Form.” This revised approach would place our future, represented by sustainability, at the forefront of our design thinking. It would encourage us to first ask ourselves, “What is the most sustainable way to design X?” and then consider how the function of X can be met while ensuring it remains non-harmful to people and the planet.
Friday, May 5th, 2023
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker
Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.
Once again, absolutely spot-on analysis from Ted Chiang.
I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.
Thursday, May 4th, 2023
Artificial intelligence: who owns the future? - ethical.net
Whether consciously or not, AI manufacturers have decided to prioritise plausibility over accuracy. It means AI systems are impressive, but in a world plagued by conspiracy and disinformation this decision only deepens the problem.
Wednesday, April 26th, 2023
“the secret list of websites” - Chris Coyier
Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.
I concur with Chris’s assessment:
I just think it’s fuckin’ rude.
Monday, April 17th, 2023
The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.
Friday, April 14th, 2023
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database
The AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems.
Wednesday, March 15th, 2023
Stochastic Parrots Day Tickets, Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite
This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.
Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜 two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.
Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.
Thursday, February 2nd, 2023
Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm – Eric Bailey
A person seeking help in a time of crisis does not care about TypeScript, tree shaking, hot module replacement, A/B tests, burndown charts, NPS, OKRs, KPIs, or other startup jargon. Developer experience does not count for shit if the person using the thing they built can’t actually get what they need.
Friday, November 25th, 2022
No To Spy Pixels
Almost no-one has given informed constent to being tracked through spy pixels in emails, and yet the practice is endemic. This is wrong. It needs to change.
Monday, September 19th, 2022
W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles (slides)
The slides from Tess’s presentation on the W3C’s ethical web principles—there’s a transcript too.
CSS { In Real Life } | Web Sustainability and the Ethical Dilemma
But is it always the case that faster websites are greener websites? We reluctantly have to consider another facet: if making a website for a car manufacturer faster leads to an increase in the number of cars sold, can we really say that our website is greener?
This is very timely for me, given that Clearleft is currently engaged on a project that’s making me decidedly queasy for this exact reason—the success metrics of the project would be net negative for the world.
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022
Work ethics
If you’re travelling around Ireland, you may come across some odd pieces of 19th century architecture—walls, bridges, buildings and roads that serve no purpose. They date back to The Great Hunger of the 1840s. These “famine follies” were the result of a public works scheme.
The thinking went something like this: people are starving so we should feed them but we can’t just give people food for nothing so let’s make people do pointless work in exchange for feeding them (kind of like an early iteration of proof of work for cryptobollocks on blockchains …except with a blockchain, you don’t even get a wall or a road, just ridiculous amounts of wasted energy).
This kind of thinking seems reprehensible from today’s perspective. But I still see its echo in the work ethic espoused by otherwise smart people.
Here’s the thing: there’s good work and there’s working hard. What matters is doing good work. Often, to do good work you need to work hard. And so people naturally conflate the two, thinking that what matters is working hard. But whether you work hard or not isn’t actually what’s important. What’s important is that you do good work.
If you can do good work without working hard, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s great—you’ve managed to do good work and do it efficiently! But often this very efficiency is treated as laziness.
Sensible managers are rightly appalled by so-called productivity tracking because it measures exactly the wrong thing. Those instruments of workplace surveillance measure inputs, not outputs (and even measuring outputs is misguided when what really matters are outcomes).
They can attempt to measure how hard someone is working, but they don’t even attempt to measure whether someone is producing good work. If anything, they actively discourage good work; there’s plenty of evidence to show that more hours equates to less quality.
I used to think that must be some validity to the belief that hard work has intrinsic value. It was a position that was espoused so often by those around me that it seemed a truism.
But after a few decades of experience, I see no evidence for hard work as an intrinsically valuable activity, much less a useful measurement. If anything, I’ve seen the real harm that can be caused by tying your self-worth to how much you’re working. That way lies burnout.
We no longer make people build famine walls or famine roads. But I wonder how many of us are constructing little monuments in our inboxes and calendars, filling those spaces with work to be done in an attempt to chase the rewards we’ve been told will result from hard graft.
I’d rather spend my time pursuing the opposite: the least work for the most people.
Wednesday, March 30th, 2022
Ban Online Behavioral Advertising | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Targeted advertising based on online behavior doesn’t just hurt privacy. It also contributes to a range of other harms.
I very much agree with this call to action from the EFF.
Maybe we can finally get away from the ludicrious idea that behavioural advertising is the only possible form of effective advertising. It’s simply not true.
Tuesday, January 11th, 2022
Norton
It me.
Occasionally, I wonder whether I’ve got it all wrong. Is my age, my technical unsophistication, or my fond remembrance of an internet unencumbered by commerce blinding me to the opportunities that crypto offers me? But then I read something terrible and I recant my doubts, meditate for a while and get on with my life.
Monday, January 10th, 2022
Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are
Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.
A great analysis of the system of smoke and mirrors that constitutes so-called web3:
Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.
Thursday, January 6th, 2022
Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly | Seldo.com
A very even-handed and level-headed assessment by Laurie, who has far more patience than me when it comes to this shit.