Russell Davies

Notes for a talk - these things

The AI waffle house thread

The AI weirdness corporate logo business

These sorta related issues

And, obvs:

Notes for a talk - Where the Amish Go On Vacation

Because the images. And these thoughts:

"‘The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology,’ noted Wired magazine in 1999. In 2013, an NPR reporter observed that the ‘Amish community [is] not anti-technology, just more thoughtful’. Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired, spent time geeking out with ‘Amish hackers’ and peeking into workshops whose modern machines are powered by compressed air for his book What Technology Wants (2010). He concluded that: ‘In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grip of technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honourable alternative.’

Above all, decide to be OK with seeming eccentric. The Amish’s unusual approach has allowed them to survive for centuries, even while other cooperatives and intentional communities fall by the wayside."

 From

Notes for a talk - Let's Occupy Technology With Love

Two things about technology

The first thing is that Zoom gives everyone headaches.

It’s not just you.

And the second is that we all, over time, co-create the digital products we use.

Rachel Coldicutt

Notes for a talk - Sontag, Owolade

"The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious."

Susan Sontag

"The context in which we consume - and tell - stories has always mattered. The American anthropologist Polly Wiessner argues that when humans tamed fire, they not only extended the day but also created the conditions in %3D which a new kind of storytelling could thrive. "Stories told by firelight put listeners on the same emotional wavelength," she wrote in a 2014 paper based on her time studying the Ju/'hoan or !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa. During the day, these hunter-gatherers did mundane things. At night, the stories they told around the campfire unleashed their imaginations."

Tomiwa Owolade

Notes for a talk - Ways of Being

These bits from Ways of Being are somehow in the mulch:

'What counts as technology is also much debated. I like the definition given by the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, in a rebuff to critics who accused her of not including enough of it in her work. ‘Technology’, she wrote, ‘is the active human interface with the material world.’ Its definition, for Le Guin, wasn’t limited to ‘high’ technology, like computers and jet bombers; rather, it referred to anything that was produced by human ingenuity. That included fire, clothing, wheels, knives, clocks, combine harvesters – and paperclips. To those who consider technology, whether high or low, to be too complex, too specialized or too abstruse to think fully and clearly about, Le Guin had some words of encouragement: ‘I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.’ That is worth keeping in mind as we proceed, because we will be encountering plenty of examples of ‘high’ technology that might seem daunting at the outset – but every one of them has been thought, learned and done by someone who sleeps at night and shits in the morning. We can learn to do them too.'

(This also reminds me of me disliking Shop Class as Soul Craft. Which, I'd forgotten, ends with a reference to the same bit of Le Guin.)

'As we shall see, the subjecthood of which we speak springs up all around us when we consider how we relate to everything else. Being itself is relational: a matter of interrelationships. All that is required for sticks and stones to leap into life, wrote the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, is our own presence. Our human agency and intentionality transforms the objects of culture into subjects, through the meaning we give to them and the uses we put them to. While the machines we are constructing today might one day take on their own, undeniable form of life, more akin to the life we recognize in ourselves, to wait for them to do so is to miss out on the full implications of more-than-human personhood. They are already alive, already their own subjects, in ways that matter profoundly to us and to the planet. In the words often attributed to Marshall McLuhan (but more properly ascribed to Winston Churchill): ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’ We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us. Our tools have agency, and thus a claim upon the more-than-human world as well. This realization allows us to begin the core task of a technological ecology: the reintegration of advanced human craft with the nature it sprung from.'

'We have come, as the shock of more-than-human consciousness testifies, to think of ‘nature’ as something separate from ourselves. When we speak of the fantastical futures envisioned by high technology, we speak of a ‘new’ or ‘next’ nature, some utopia of computation which further alienates and supplants the actual ground we came from and still stand upon. It is time to put aside such adolescent solipsism – both for the sake of ourselves and of the more-than-human world. There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.'

'For Epstein, seeing is necessary for knowing and caring, and thus for acting. I would add to this the quality of practice. The act of making time-lapses for myself, whether of my living room or the whole Mediterranean basin, engenders in me an attentiveness to plant and planetary time that I do not gain merely from watching others’ footage on YouTube...Viewing inspires awe, but practice generates knowledge and understanding. The tools of technology, to be effective in producing altered states, require us to be full participants in their revelations, not mere audiences. This is why it’s so important that we are given access not just to the products of all these wondrous technologies – the beautiful images shot by satellites – but to the technologies themselves. What must be made available to all is education in their actual use: the knowledge and know-how to design and deploy them critically and thoughtfully, and real access to existing tools and processes. It is not enough to turn the machines around – to point the satellites outward, rather than at ourselves. They must also be shared out and placed in the hands of everyone.'

'Today, ‘lol’ has escaped the boxes of IM and SMS to become something people actually say: not just a new word, but a new utterance. Unlike ‘haha’ and ‘hehe’, which are onomatopoeias birthed in the convulsion of the human lungs, ‘lol’ is a product of the constriction of space and time in computer systems. It is an environmental effect on language, that supposedly innate human trait which might instead be understood as the world – or, in this case, the machine – speaking through us.'

'I’m just sixty kilometres from the site where I first smelled petroleum on the breeze and learned of plans to use rapacious, corporate AI to crack open and despoil the land, but the journey from one place to another has encompassed gibbons, elephants, giant redwoods and slime moulds; neural networks, non-binary computers, satellites and self-driving cars; the I Ching, the music of John Cage and Sámi joikers, new forms of ancient governance, and herds of GPS-augmented antelope. The world is a computer made out of crabs, infinitely entangled at every level, and singing, full-throated, the song of its own becoming. The only way forward is together.'

Notes for a talk - Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth

I'm doing a talk in a few weeks. The kind I haven't done for ages. In front of people. And it requires some ideas. New ideas. Ideas that aren't about how to divide your presentation into three.

As per usual I have a title, a vague idea of territory and a bunch of notes and links. But no idea how they all go together. If, indeed, they do.

So I thought I'd start by sticking them no here, see if that helps. It often does.

There are these bits from Cory Doctorow's interview with Kim Stanley Robinson in Fatherly magazine:

Cory Doctorow: Both The High Sierra and The Ministry for the Future are about the climate emergency and nature. What would you say to kids about nature and the emergency?

Kim Stanley Robinson: You can tell kids, “50% of the DNA inside your body is not human DNA.” You yourself are a forest. You are an amazing collaboration between literally millions of individuals and thousands of species. That’s so strange that it might take some getting used to, but it's good to know the truth, and it is true.

If you can understand all that, you might think, “Well, that’s that swamp, that there aren’t very many swamps left. That hill that is wild at the edge of town, that’s part of my body. If we tear it apart, we're tearing apart, like my foot, and then I’m harmed.”

The sense of connection between our bodies and our world needs to be enhanced — especially for modern kids who are very often Internet-ed, looking at their screens. Screens are all very well, that urge to communicate. But the planet around you, the landscape, is part of your body that needs to stay healthy. I would start with that and go on from there.

CD: I’m thinking of my own kid. She’s 14 now. She's been locked indoors because of the pandemic, and it’s become a habit. She wants to be on screens with her friends in her bedroom with the door closed. The great outdoors are a little scary and uncomfortable for her. How can a parent approach the High Sierras or other wild places?

KSR: Scale the trip to the strength of the person you’re taking so that they don’t experience it as suffering and renunciation — allow them to be comfortable. At that age, they’ll actually be quite strong. Even if they sit all day, every day, they will have native strengths that will come into play.

I started taking my kids up into the Sierra when they were 2 and carried them a lot of the way. If you have kids that young, carry them and let them trip around the campsites but not have to get into a mode of suffering, because then they won’t like it the rest of their lives.

CD: The High Sierra is a book about how the Sierras changed your life, how you went up and never came down. How did it change your life?

KSR: It’s not straightforward. I keep a garden. I grow vegetables and, therefore, I live in fear because I know that we’re not even in control of our food supplies.

I began working outdoors. I put up a tarp, so I had shade on my laptop. The first time it rained, the tarp kept the rain off. All of my novels in the last 16 years have been written 100% outside.

The heat is hard, but the cold is not, and you can work in the rain too, and it’s quite glorious. For three or four novels in a row, my last day of work coincided with bizarre storms, and I was thinking that it was nature’s way of going out with a flourish.

I came home and I realized that it’s best to spend more time outdoors than we do. There’s a lot of people who know it’s fun to be outdoors because they’re carpenters and they’re outdoors all the time, and they like it. Farmers too. But writers, not so much. So a garden, working outdoors and then being an activist for environmentalist causes, greening everything in my life and my political aspirations of looking for what would be best for the biosphere.

Aldo Leopold said, “What's good is what’s good for the land.” It’s a deep moral orientation — like a compass north — but the land, the biosphere, goes from the bottom of the ocean as high in the air as living things. Think about the land not as just dead mineral sand but as soil. It’s alive. So “what's good is what’s good for the land” becomes a rubric you can follow all over the place.

 

 

Get em while they're short

Anne's latest collection of tiny, tiny fiction is available in the shop. 

The heads of the Harwich Redoubt

Devolution

This post is self-care. I am helping myself come to terms with the fact that 'evolve' has devolved. Most of the time, in regular language, it just means change. It's just fancy talk for change.

I used to be cross about this. I have to let that go. It's what happens. Language evolves.

Backseat AI

James blogs a lovely thought about AI assistants for craft tasks. It reminded me of the story "Under the Northern Lights" by Charlotte M. Ray from this SolarPunk anthology. There are pocket-AIs in this world, they advise on things like how to build a craft and what materials and supplies you might need for a trip.

"We spent the next day following her AI’s directions in breaking apart the camper to dry it all out. It guided us in a childlike, cartoonish voice, which cracked me up every time I heard it. Krista looked a little embarrassed when I asked about it, but to me, it felt like we were breaking new ground. I knew something private about her now, something I got the feeling no one else knew. “I can change it into something more serious if you want,” she said, then continued before I had a chance to reply. “I figured being alone in a self-built blimp that I hadn’t tested for long flights yet was a little risky, so I wanted the AI to sound the opposite of serious. You know?”

James suggests using trackback for me to tell him about this. Does that still work? If it does I no longer know how to do it. If someone sees James will they tell him? But don't make a special trip.