Human/Posthuman

Postcard #41

Fortepan / Gömöri család

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

If there is any consensus in the debates surrounding AI, it is the indispensability of the human element. For this assumption to be more than just a romantic way of reassuring ourselves, we need to clarify exactly what it means. This week’s POSTCARD brings together a collection of noteworthy contributions on the matter.

• Human touch

  Adam Ozimek makes a historical argument: people have always preferred the human touch, even when mechanical alternatives are available. Think live music, theater performances, and attentive service in a restaurant.

• Last mile

  Few authors match Hollis Robbins for her sharp and thought-provoking insights into AI and what she calls „the last mile“: local expertise and human judgment that exceeds AI capability. You can find the original „last-mile-articles“ here and here; more on the topic here (how universities approach strategic decision-making), here (learning velocity), and here (personalized education).

• Tacit knowledge

  Chris Walker worked as a „forward deployed engineer“ at Palantir from 2010 to 2016. He learned that eventually it’s not the code that makes the difference, it’s „an understanding of how work actually gets done“ – a knowledge that cannot be digitized.

• AI-native firms

  Jasmine Sun: „Increasingly, fewer jobs will look like doing tasks ourselves, and more will involve teaching AIs to do them for us. How can we transfer context to the machine? Can they adopt the values and instincts we’ve evolved over millennia to have? (...) Can you teach taste? Creativity? Learning to learn? This is the great pedagogical project of our time.“

• All our records will be lost

  M. E. Rothwell takes a long-term view: „As a civilisation we seem to think that anything ‘backed up’ digitally is safe forever. But the 1s and 0s of our online archives remain bound by the laws of the physical world, stored as they are in data farms and cloud servers. Bit-rot and data-decay will ensure that in a mere millennium from now all our records will be lost, if the hardware is not constantly maintained, new copies not continually forged. A thousand years is a long time — do we really think our descendants will seek to preserve all that we’ve produced? Energy constraints, future wars, or the simple act of forgetting will most likely render all our online activities to the abyss.“

Noteworthy

„- I will assume that anybody speaking might know something I don’t;

- All who are speaking from behind a screen are equal until proven otherwise;

- I will not suspend my own judgment just because whoever is speaking claims to have institutional authority behind them;

- I will not be impressed with what someone has said because I have heard of them before. The converse is true as well. I will endeavor to give someone I have heard of an equal hearing even if my envy and resentment may predispose me against them;

- I will endeavor within reason to give extra hearing to the powerless and voiceless.“

—Sam Kahn, outlining an ethos for the digital era

A mystery link leading into the unknown

An ode...

• ...to the places people go to.

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.