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New year's resolution is to read moar books. So here I am.
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Julien Deswaef's books
2024 Reading Goal
80% complete! Julien Deswaef has read 8 of 10 books.
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Sustein and a collaborator, the jurist Timor Kuran, invented a name for the mechanism through which biases flow into policy: the availability cascade.
[...]
An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action.
— Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman (Page 142)
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
— Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman (Page 62)
Julien Deswaef started reading Impact Evaluation in Practice by Sebastian Martinez
Julien Deswaef reviewed Le monde sans fin by Christophe Blain
Une grosse claque
5 stars
Pour qui s'intéresse un petit peu aux enjeux climatiques, on a déjà entendu ces arguments à différents endroits. Ici, mis bouts-à-bouts dans un dialogue fluide, dense par son contenu, parsemé de notes humoristique, nous fout une grosse baffe dans la gueule. Et on fait quoi maintenant?
Julien Deswaef finished reading Le monde sans fin by Christophe Blain
Excellent. À mettre dans toutes les mains. #ClimateCrisis
Julien Deswaef finished reading Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith
Those committed to the idea that we are drawing ever closer to realizing 'full' AI implicitly believe that at some level human identity is computational. While very little of AI actually aims to simulate brain behavior, and almost none of it is based on human psychology, this is a non-issue to computationalists.
— Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith (Page 299)
Stuart Kauffman has used mathematical models to show that living systems tend to evolve towards an edge of chaos: that point where their behaviour is maximally random while maintaining some structure. Existing at this edge allows the evolving system to retain the maximum number of adjacent possible states that it can change to at any moment, while still maintaining stable behaviours.
— Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith (Page 287)
None of these [AI] algorithms comprehend meaning in any real sense of the word; instead they simply assume that the statistics of past human communications in their big data sets predict the propensities of human words, sentences and documents in the future. Thus, they simply feed back to us our own words, replicating things we have said in the past, and echoing them into the future. The question is: how might such feedback effect the evolution of human culture?
— Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith (Page 226)
In 1981, the AI researcher and Yale University professor Drew McDermott called this practice of naming computational phenomena with words denoting human characteristics and capabilities wishful mnemonics. He suggested that technologists' use of such words reflected a deep-seated desire for the computational objects in question to magically assume the human-like qualities being described.
— Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith (Page 208 - 209)
Algorithms that divide complex human capabilities into simplified features are not only a catalyst for dehumanization, they are the mechanism that causes it. To overcome this, we need to think again about Al's role in the economy and society from the point of view of the welfare of humanity rather than the overriding efficiency of the machine.
— Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith (Page 149)
Instead of the proletariat we now have the precariat: a class of people with insecure jobs afraid to ask for pay rises or improved working conditions. And, just like the Luddites before them, workers insist that they are not against innovation, technology or flexibility, they just want some basic rights and security.
— Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith (Page 144)
Julien Deswaef started reading Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith
Rage Inside the Machine by Robert Elliott Smith
We live in a world increasingly ruled by technology; we seem as governed by technology as we do by laws …