Hi all,

I’m glad to see you again. It feels like a long time. I’ve been through all of your essays. Please review my comments.

I will be providing a new Zoom link here and on Slack before class. I just want to test it at City Tech.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88212423013?pwd=ajRDbU1iOZbQR2FM3wmOCMbJmOaL1h.1

Meeting ID: 882 1242 3013
Passcode: Topics

I’d like to open up class by briefly going through your ideas and discussing the articles assigned:

Discuss proposals: Topic and Media module:

Loosely based on Kate Crawford’s Anatomy of an AI System , your midterm is a research project in which you create a multi-modular project such as a web site, video essay or podcast that provides a “map of a technological object” of your choice. Trace its production and development as you consider its environmental sustainability, the physical labor and digital labor practices involved in its development, and its ethical relationship to the end user and society at large.

Deliverables include: the media project and a written component 

We’ll then continue thinking through some of the issues surrounding AI and AGI

Here are some topics in no particular order being discussed:

  • Copyright, Opensource, Scraping
  • Algorithmic Bias / surveillance
  • Environmental concerns
  • Future unintended Consequences/Paperclip problem AI and the paperclip problem/Singularity
  • Labor/Employment
  • Governance/Competitive advantage – Regularity capture

The biggest fear with AI is fear itself | De Kai | TEDxSanMigueldeAllende

dek.ai

Moving away from concerns about content produced by AI – I would like to discuss some of the environmental concerns surrounding and how that is being excerbated by AI.

Meanwhile in other news or is it? https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage

Published in the NYT yesterday: Hungry for Energy, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Turn to Nuclear Power

Propaganda, Fake news – Misinformation and Disinformation

Mind Over Media by Rennee Hobbs
Propaganda is responsive to changes in culture, technology, and society

read pg 4-6

Group work:

Using the formula discussed in Hobbs create a propaganda campaign to present to the class. Create a “campaign” that includes talking points (yes actors this one is for you!) and design a presentation/poster in AI enhanced canva.com

I will give each group a theme to consider.

Explore the power of language to make something seem terrific or awful by
using Hugh Rank’s intensify/downplay scheme. Many forms of propaganda
and persuasion use this formula.

Activity: Can you make someone love a topic or hate it through the use of propaganda.

Intensify: Make something look good. The significance of an idea, product, or person can be increased through repetition, association, and composition.

  • Repetition. Repetition of words or images makes messages morememorable, and it also leads people to accept what is being repeatedas being true.
  • Association. Persuaders link an idea, product, or person with some-
    thing people naturally desire or fear.
  • Composition. Creative use of design, variations in sequence, and
    patterns to help attract and hold the audience’s attention.
    Downplay: Make something look small, bad, or unimportant. Something
    can be made to seem insignificant by diverting attention from it, or
    reducing people’s attention to it by distracting them with something
    more interesting.
  • Diversion. Provide something more entertaining, interesting or
    important for people to focus on.
  • Omission. Do not call attention to a message you dislike; instead,
    simply ignore it.
  • Confusion. Shower people with too much information on a topic you
    want to downplay, so that they feel overwhelmed and their attention
    is diminished.

The Takeaway: The creative use of language can shape people’s percep-
tions and interpretations of reality.

—Adapted from H. Rank (1991), The Pitch

Disinfo Discussions: The Fundamentals with danah boyd

https://datasociety.net

Homework

Research your object using the following as a guide line. Take notes, collect links, etc.

  • Production/materials/labor/
  • User experience/governance/ethical relationship to user and society/digital rights/historical roots/evolution of object/etc.
  • Sustainability/recycling/right to repair/

Anatomy of an AI System

A few resources on regulating AI:

Digital Labor: Mechanical Turks and the culmination of human machine collaborations.