Tags: humanity

I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes.

When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregman, Rebecca Solnit, and Hans Rosling, pointing to all the evidence that people are, by and large, decent. I should really just read the room and shut up.

I opened my talk Of Time And The Web with a whole spiel about how we seem to be hard-wired to pay more attention to bad news than good (perhaps for valid evolutionary reasons).

I like to think that my optimism is rational, backed up by data. But if I’m going to be rational, then I also can’t become too attached to any particualar position (like, say, optimism). I should be willing to change my mind when I’m confronted with new evidence.

A truckload of new evidence got dumped on my psyche this week. The United States of America elected Donald Trump as president. Again.

Even here I found a small glimmer of a bright side: at least the result was clear cut. I was dreading weeks or even months of drawn-out ballot counting, lawsuits and uncertainty. At least the band-aid was decisively ripped away.

Back in 2016, I could tell myself all sorts of reasons why this might have happened. Why people might have been naïve or misled into voting a dangerous idiot into power. But the naïveté was all mine. The majority of America really is that sexist.

This feels very different to 2016. And hey, remember when we woke up to that election result and one of the first things we did was take out subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post to “support real journalism”? Yeah, that worked out just great, didn’t it?

My faith in human nature is taking quite a hit. An electoral experiment has been run three times now—having this mysogistic racist narcissistic idiot run for the highest office in the land—and the same result came up twice.

I naïvely thought that the more people saw of his true nature, the less chance he would have. When he kept going off-script at his rallies, spouting the vilest of threats, I thought there was an upside. At least now people would see for themselves what he’s really like.

But in the end it didn’t matter one whit. Like I said in a different context:

To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”

I never liked talking about “faith” in human nature. To me, it wasn’t faith. It was just a rational assessment. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need some faith after all.

I wonder if my optimism will return. It probably will (see? I’m such an optimist). But if it does, perhaps it will have to be an optimism that exists despite the data, not because of it.

The Value Of Science by Richard P. Feynman [PDF]

This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning

Aboard Newsletter: Why So Bad, AI Ads?

The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.

On being human and “creative”

Now we have this collision of those who, with the specific intent of creative expression, make things that are wholly the product of their unique experience and skills and offer them in the marketplace. Then there are those who use machines to produce derivatives of other’s creative work to offer as products in the marketplace. Both are seeking an audience and financial benefit for their offering.

Those who wholly manufacture creative works are asking the same value be put on their imitation of creative expression as the value inherent with sentient creation. They are saying they deserve the same recognition—be that in respect, attention, acknowledgement or compensation—that works created by a person might receive. But they haven’t earned it.

Using generative AI is to ask What If but then hand off not only the responsibility and effort of answering the question but also accountability for the answer. When the machine creates something pleasing or marketable, it’s “look at what I did”. When the machine creates something terrible or wrong, it’s “not my fault, the machine did it”. The claim of ownership is conditional and only maintained if the output can generate value.

There’s so much to love here, like this:

My art is the story of how I have spent the time in my life.

And this:

The value of an idea comes from the execution of the idea.

AI Safety for Fleshy Humans: a whirlwind tour

This is a terrificly entertaining level-headed in-depth explanation of AI safety. By the end of this year, all three parts will be published; right now the first part is ready for you to read and enjoy.

This 3-part series is your one-stop-shop to understand the core ideas of AI & AI Safety — explained in a friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated way!

( Related phrases: AI Risk, AI X-Risk, AI Alignment, AI Ethics, AI Not-Kill-Everyone-ism. There is no consensus on what these phrases do & don’t mean, so I’m just using “AI Safety” as a catch-all.)

AI is not like you and me

AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human.

But ascribing human qualities to AI is not serving us well. Anthropomorphizing statistical models leads to confusion about what AI does well, what it does poorly, what form it should take, and our agency over all of the above.

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology?

Meanwhile, we are under-investing in more precise, high-value applications of LLMs that treat generative A.I. models not as people but as tools.

Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“‘AI’ is pretty much just shorthand for mediocre” — Piper Haywood

Continuous partial ick …or perhaps continuous partial cringe.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

Can Apple Win Back Music | Vulf Opinion | Brad Frost

There’s no AI substitute for a human-produced drawing of someone on the subway, even if a similar-or-even-better result could be produced in seconds by AI. The artifact is often less important than the process — the human process — that made it. That’s why I suspect videos of creative processes are so attractive; we are captivated by seeing humans doing human things.

Emily F. Gorcenski: How I Read 40 Books and Extinguished the World on Fire

I’ve found that there’s way more good people than bad. There’s way more people willing to help than willing to hurt. Some things are really scary but there’s way more people out there willing to guide us through the darkness than we think. The cynic in me wants to say that the “powers that be” want us to be endlessly doomscrolling and losing hope and snuffing out optimism. We shouldn’t give them what they want. There’s a lot of beauty in the world still within our grasp. We’re better when we’re poets, when we’re learners and listeners, when we’re builders and not breakers.

“Artificial Intelligence & Humanity,” an article by Dan Mall

AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related.

Sensible thinking from Dan here, that mirrors what we’re thinking at Clearleft.

In other words, it leans heavily on averages; the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable.

The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest.

On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub

An excerpt from First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva.

Food Timeline: food history research service

The history of humanity in food and recipes.

The timeline of this website is equally impressive—it’s been going since 1999!

When shaken to the core, we get priorities right. Can we stick to it? – Dr. Carolina Odman

Carolina’s post reminds me of A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit:

In the face of disaster, survivors get together, make time and help one another regardless of their differences. It is beautiful and inspiring.

How are you doing? Are you holding up okay?

It’s okay if you’re not. This is a tough time.

It’s very easy to become despondent about the state of the world. If you tend to lean towards pessimism, The Situation certainly seems to be validating your worldview right now.

I’m finding that The Situation is also a kind of Rorschach test. If you’ve always felt that humanity wasn’t deserving of your faith—that “we are the virus”—then there’s plenty happening right now to bolster that opinion. But if you’ve always thought that human beings are fundamentally good and decent, there’s just as much happening to reinforce that viewpoint.

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together:

Our street (and the guy who runs the nearby corner store) is self-organizing so that everyone’s looking out for each other, checking up on elderly and self-isolating folks, sharing contact details, picking up shopping if necessary, and generally just being good humans.

This goodwill extends just about to the level of city mayorships. But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

Best of all, you can absolutely be part of this wonderful effort. In normal times, civic activism would require you to take action, get out there, and march in the streets. Now you can be a local hero by staying at home.

That’s it. Stay inside, resist the urge to congregate, and chat to your friends and relatives online instead. If you do that, you are being a most excellent human being—the kind that restores your faith in humanity.

I know it feels grim and overwhelming but, again, look at what’s triggering those feelings—is it the national news? International? I know it’s important to stay informed about the big picture—this is a global pandemic, after all—but don’t lose sight of what’s close to hand. Look closer to home and you’ll see the helpers—heck, you are one of the helpers.

On Ev’s blog, Fiona Cameron Lister quotes the president of the Italian Society of Psychiatrists:

Fear of an epidemic is as old as mankind itself. In this case its effect is amplified by incomplete, even false information which has caused public confidence in our institutions to collapse.

She points out that the media are in the business of amplifying the outliers of negative behaviour—panic buying, greed, and worst-case scenarios. But she goes on to say:

It doesn’t take much to start a panic and we are teetering on the brink.

Not to be the “well, actually” guy but …well, actually…

That view of humanity as being poised on the brink of mass panic is the common consensus viewpoint; it even influences public policy. But the data doesn’t support this conclusion. (If you want details, I highly recommend reading Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball.) Thinking of ordinary people as being one emergency away from panicking is itself giving into fear.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re feeling misanthropic about your fellow humans right now, try rebalancing your intake. Yes, it’s good to keep yourself informed about national and global events, but make sure to give plenty of attention to the local level too. You may just find your heart warming and your spirits lifting.

After all, you’re a good person, right? And you probably also think of yourself as a fairly ordinary person, right? So if you’re doing the right thing—making small sacrifices and being concerned for your neighbours—then logic dictates that most other people are too.

I have faith in you:

When this is over, I hope we will be proud of how well we loved one another.

s08e05: There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - Things That Have Caught My Attention

A global communications network now exists that’s cheap enough or in some cases even free to access, offering a pseudonymous way for people to feel safe enough to share a private experience with complete strangers? I give Facebook and Twitter a bunch of shit for their rhetoric about a global community (no, Facebook’s billions of users are no more a community than the television-watching global community) and creating authentic connection, but I will very happily admit that this, this particular example with people sharing what it is like to be me and learning what is it like to be you is the good.

This is the thing that makes free, open, networked communication brilliant. This is the thing that brings down silos and creates common understanding and humanizes us all, that creates empathy and the first steps towards compassion.

That someone can read about this insight and have a way to react to it and share their perspective and not even know who else might read it, but feel safe in doing so and maybe even with the expectation that this sharing is a net good? That is good. That is what we should strive for.

A Tale of Two Clocks

Doomsday vs. the Long Now.

Living in Alan Turing’s Future | The New Yorker

Portrait of the genius as a young man.

It is fortifying to remember that the very idea of artificial intelligence was conceived by one of the more unquantifiably original minds of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine a computer being able to do what Alan Turing did.

Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift

If a human civilization beyond Earth ever comes into being, this will be unprecedented in any historical context we might care to invoke—unprecedented in recorded history, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in terrestrial history, and so on. There have been many human civilizations, but all of these civilizations have arisen and developed on the surface of Earth, so that a civilization that arises or develops away from the surface of Earth would be unprecedented and in this sense absolutely novel even if the institutional structure of a spacefaring civilization were the same as the institutional structure of every civilization that has existed on Earth. For this civilizational novelty, some human novelty is a prerequisite, and this human novelty will be expressed in the mythology that motivates and sustains a spacefaring civilization.

A deep dive into deep time:

Record-keeping technologies introduce an asymmetry into history. First language, then written language, then printed books, and so and so forth. Should human history extend as far into the deep future as it now extends into the deep past, the documentary evidence of past beliefs will be a daunting archive, but in an archive so vast there would be a superfluity of resources to trace the development of human mythologies in a way that we cannot now trace them in our past. We are today creating that archive by inventing the technologies that allow us to preserve an ever-greater proportion of our activities in a way that can be transmitted to our posterity.

It’s Patty Toland’s first time at An Event Apart! She’s from the fantabulous Filament Group. They’re dedicated to making the web work for everyone.

A few years ago, a good friend of Patty’s had a medical diagnosis that required everyone to pull together. Another friend shared an article about how not to say the wrong thing. This is ring theory. In a moment of crisis, the person involved is in the centre. You need to understand where you are in this ring structure, and only ever help and comfort inwards and dump concerns and problems outwards.

At the same time, Patty spent time with her family at the beach. Everyone reads the same books together. There was a book about a platoon leader in Vietnam. 80% of the story was literally a litany of stuff—what everyone was carrying. This was peppered with the psychic and emotional loads that they were carrying.

A month later there was a lot of coverage of Syrian refugees arriving in Europe. People were outraged to see refugees carrying smartphones as though that somehow showed they weren’t in a desperate situation. But smartphones are absolutely a necessity in that situation, and most of the phones were less expensive, lower-end devices. Refugeeinfo.eu was a useful site for people in crisis, but the navigation was designed to require JavaScript.

When people thing about mobile, they think about freedom and mobility. But with that JavaScript decision, the developers piled baggage on to the users.

There was a common assertion that slow networks were a third-world challenge. Remember Facebook’s network challenges? They always talked about new markets in India and Africa. The implication is that this isn’t our problem in, say, Omaha or New York.

Pew Research provided a lot of data back then that showed that this thinking was wrong. Use of cell phones, especially smartphones and tablets, escalated dramatically in the United States. There was a trend towards mobile-only usage. This was in low-income households—about one third of the population. Among 5,400 panelists, 15% did not have a JavaScript-enabled device.

Pew Research provided updated data this year. The research shows an increase in those trends. Half of the population access the web primarily on mobile. The cost of a broadband subscription is too expensive for many people. Sometimes broadband access simply isn’t available.

There’s a term called “the homework gap.” Two thirds of teachers assign broadband-dependent homework, while one third of students have no access to broadband.

At most 37% of people have unlimited data. Most people run out of data on a frequent basis.

Speed also varies wildly. 4G doesn’t really mean anything. The data is all over the place.

This shows that network issues are definitely not just a third world challenge.

On the 25th anniversary of the web, Tim Berners-Lee said the web’s potential was only just beginning to be glimpsed. Everyone has a role to play to ensure that the web serves all of humanity. In his contract for the web, Tim outlined what governments, companies, and users need to do. This reminded Patty of ring theory. The user is at the centre. Designers and developers are in the next circle out. Then there’s the circle of companies. Then there are platforms, browsers, and frameworks. Finally there’s the outer circle of governments.

Are we helping in or dumping in? If you look at the data for the average web page size (2 megabytes), we are definitely dumping in. The size of third-party JavaScript has octupled.

There’s no way for a user to know before clicking a link how big and bloated the page is going to be. Even if they abandon the page load, they’ve still used (and wasted) a lot of data.

Third party scripts—like ads—are really bad at dumping in (to use the ring theory model). The best practices for ads suggest that up to 100 additional HTTP requests is totally acceptable. Unbelievable! It doesn’t matter how performant you’ve made a site when this crap gets piled on top of it.

In 2018, the internet’s data centres alone may already have had the same carbon footprint as all global air travel. This will probably triple in the next seven years. The amount of carbon it takes to train a single AI algorithm is more than the entire life cycle of a car. Then there’s fucking Bitcoin. A single Bitcoin transaction could power 21 US households. It is designed to use—specifically, waste—more and more energy over time.

What should we be doing?

Accessibility should be at the heart of what we build. Plan, test, educate, and advocate. If advocacy doesn’t work, fear can be a motivator. There’s an increase in accessibility lawsuits.

Our websites should be as light as possible. Ask, measure, monitor, and optimise. RequestMap is a great tool for visualising requests. You can see the size and scale of third-party requests. You can also see when images are far, far bigger than they need to be.

Take a critical guide to everything and pare everything down. Set perforance budgets—file size budgets, for example. Optimise images, subset custom fonts, lazyload images and videos, get third-party tools out of the critical path (or out completely), and seek out lighter frameworks.

Test on real devices that real people are using. See Alex Russell’s data on the differences between the kind of devices we use and typical low-end devices. We literally need to stop people in JavaScript.

Push the boundaries. See the amazing work that Adrian Holovaty did with Soundslice. He had to make on-the-fly sheet music generation work on old iPads that musicians like to use. He recommends keeping old devices around to see how poorly your product is working on it.

If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

—Toni Morrison

The sublime Romanticism of the moon landing

The lunar landing was not a scientific announcement or a political press conference; it was a performance, a literal space opera, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk that brought together the efforts of more than 400,000 people, performed before an audience of some 650 million. It was a victory, as Armstrong immediately recognized, not of Western democratic capitalism over Soviet tyranny, or of America over the rest of the world, but for humanity. It belongs to the United States no more than Michelangelo does to Italy or Machu Picchu to Peru.