User Profile

bgainor

bgainor@bookwyrm.social

Joined 5 months, 3 weeks ago

Programmer with a linguistics background, dad, trekkie. He/him Mastodon: @bgainor@mstdn.party

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bgainor's books

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Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna: The AI Con (Hardcover, Penguin Random House)

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …

It’s easy to talk about benefits justifying the costs when you aren’t the ones actually paying the costs. Not only the tech barons, but also most of their highly paid employees are fairly insulated from the climate crisis, compared to climate refugees, those living in tropical zones, and precarious clickworkers who, even in the U.S., can’t afford air conditioning or easily escape from smoke-choked cities during ever-extending fire seasons.

The AI Con by , (Page 160)

Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna: The AI Con (Hardcover, Penguin Random House)

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …

Just because you’ve identified a social problem doesn’t mean LLMs or any other kind of so-called AI are a solution. When someone says so, the problem is usually better understood by widening the lens, looking at it in its broader context. As Shankar Narayan, the Tech and Liberty Project director for ACLU of Washington, asked regarding biased recidivism prediction systems: Why are we asking who is most likely to reoffend rather than what do these people need to give them the best chance of not reoffending? Likewise, when someone suggests a robo-doctor, robo-therapist, or robo-teacher, we should ask: Why isn’t there enough money for public clinics, mental health counseling, and schools? Text synthesis machines can’t fill holes in the social fabric. We need people, political will, and resources.

The AI Con by , (Page 99)

Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna: The AI Con (Hardcover, Penguin Random House)

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …

An initial security audit of that tool has shown that, because of the way language models are trained, generated code is uniquely vulnerable to common cybersecurity attacks. Researchers found in testing that 40 percent of Copilot-generated computer programs were vulnerable to some of the most common cybersecurity weaknesses. This is because code generation is made possible due to the repetition of the most common programming idioms in the training data. Those are not the most secure.

The AI Con by , (Page 53)

Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna: The AI Con (Hardcover, Penguin Random House)

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …

While executives suggest that AI is going to be a labor-saving device, in reality it is meant to be a labor-breaking one. It is intended to devalue labor by threatening workers with technology that can supposedly do their job at a fraction of the cost.

The AI Con by , (Page 42)

Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna: The AI Con (Hardcover, Penguin Random House)

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …

To put it bluntly, “AI” is a marketing term. It doesn’t refer to a coherent set of technologies. Instead, the phrase “artificial intelligence” is deployed when the people building or selling a particular set of technologies will profit from getting others to believe that their technology is similar to humans, able to do things that, in fact, intrinsically require human judgment, perception, or creativity.

The AI Con by , (Page 5)

reviewed We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (We Solve Murders, #1)

Richard Osman: We Solve Murders (Paperback, 2024, Penguin Books, Limited)

Light fun

It's not serious literature, but it's a fun ride. I think I liked the Thursday Murder Club books better, but Osman certainly has a way of making you get engrossed in the characters. All of his heroes are as charming as he is, which makes it believable when almost everybody seems to want to help them out in some way.

A. R. Moxon: Very Fine People (2024, J. Goat Press)

A roadmap for our time

I've followed @JuliusGoat@mastodon.social for a while now, so I knew I had to pick up his book. It has all the trademark wit and moral clarity I've come to expect from him, but coming in, I had the thought that the people who most need this book wouldn't actually be the ones reading it. In the course of the book, I realized I was one of the people who most need this book. If you think you're an ally, this is a call to action you can't ignore. I recommend this book for anyone and everyone.