#algorithmic decision-making

[vortexofadigitalkind]

She didn’t resign. She didn’t retire. She was replaced. Ten years after the AI transition, former Minister Caroline Veer returns. Not to politics, but to a quiet book signing. Her memoir tells us what the machines forgot: why leadership matters. 🔗 https://vortexofadigitalkind.com/the-vanishing-m

[savagechickens]

Decisive.

And more leadership.

[atmosphericradar]

"The point of all of this [private equity] maneuvering is decreasingly about turning a profit and increasingly about transitioning to a rent-based economy that hedges inflation."

"The reason that so many cloud-based companies are dumping so much money and resources into pushing [AI chatbots] on everyone is to capture the part of our routine that comparison-shops, or researches, or asks for advice, or arrives at a logical conclusion about something.

If you become friends with ChatGPT or Gemini or Rufus or Siri, and you consult with their vast informational resources on a more personal and casual level, you're not only supplying with the purest form of sentiment analysis, but you're helping them build a system that will further control not only your decisions on what to buy or subscribe to, but what hobby you'll take up next summer."

"...and it's worth pointing out that the primary owner of [the US government's debt] isn't China or Japan or even our own Federal Reserve, it's US investors. As this cycle continues to snowball, money will be less and less valuable, not only because of inflation, but in principal. When the government is so closely entangled with the people who have benefitted the most from this mass extraction of wealth from the capitalist economy, it stops making sense to think of wealth as money."

"To graduate - or transcend - from those unfathomable limits of what money's wealth can get you, you need to control the power of information so that you can manipulate the world that you live in. And I beleive that is exactly what's happening, and unfortunately I think it's going to get worse before it gets better."

~ quotes from You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism, by Benn Jordan

[intermundia]

i know staff is making it seem like everyone overreacted over nothing, but i strongly suggest that next time they not say with their own mouth "the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed" and that the action plan is to "get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it" like..... c'mon. the core functionality of why this site is popular with its users isn't "outdated," and the idea of pushing content that people didn't actively choose to see to their feed is clearly code for algorithm, inherently disturbing the continuity of the chronological feed, which is something many of us actively do not want. i'm very glad that we'll still be able to turn that off, but honestly i'm now more wary about where the site is headed than i had ever been before.

[fleetcaptainpike]

imagine announcing to your current users that you will be making your product twenty times worse in the hope that future subscribers will be tempted to come over

imagine alienating your audience for people who are leaving websites for the same things you're trying to add to your own

imagine saying you want to support content creators after shoving a new editor they hate forcibly down their throat

if you're @staff at tumblr dot com, you don't have to imagine

[ghoulodont]

Here’s some moral support Rain for you

thank youuuu i am healed & revitalized by these images

[bahadurislam011444]

Unveiling the Best SEO Worker in Bangladesh: Driving Digital Success

[appendingfic]

Can't believe we're at the "Man grew complacent and lazy, making the robots do all the work" part of the story but (a) by "Man" we mean "The Man", and (b) the robots aren't even sentient

[vortexofadigitalkind]

Ten Years to Transition: Britain at the Edge of AI Governance - A Scarcity Engine Prequel

Short Story Series – Science Fiction/Futurism LONDON It didn’t come with fanfare. No uprising. No revolution. Just a quiet reconfiguration of government, invisible, almost polite. By next year, more than 80 percent of the UK’s civil functions will be directed or managed by an artificial intelligence known as SOVRA: the Sovereign Rational Authority. What began as a data optimisation initiative…

[techdriveplay]

The Impact of AI on Everyday Life: A New Normal

The impact of AI on everyday life has become a focal point for discussions among tech enthusiasts, policymakers, and the general public alike. This transformative force is reshaping the way we live, work, and interact with the world around us, making its influence felt across various domains of our daily existence. Revolutionizing Workplaces One of the most significant arenas where the impact…

[coulsonlives]

Y'know, one thing that bothers about tiktok is how it incentivizes high viewcounts and engagement, it is literally made to hijack your reward system by giving you feedback like tumblr's likes and reblogs and other stuff. And you can farm this kind of feedback without actually having any education or credibility whatsoever, even for things like health and medicine. So a huge, huge part of the tiktok user base is just there for views, they spread rampant misinformation and don't care because heyyy, they get those views.

And now we have generations of people growing up with tiktok, where to them, tiktok is just another website! And that's the problem. They don't understand how tiktok works on a fundamental level, how manipulative it is, and how manipulative so many of the people on it are. They either don't understand, or constantly forget, how literally any of the content could only be there because the tiktok user wants views and reactions. Peoples' experiences on tiktok really should be coloured by skepticism because of that, by default, but it seldom seems to be, especially in young people.

I think that's part of the reason we have such a big problem with misinformation on there, and why so many young people are just totally losing the plot when it comes to serious things. They turn to tiktok and assume everyone on the platform is benevolent and there to help, because it just never occurs to em that the opposite could be true. And even if they do understand the 'don't trust everyone on the internet' thing, well, tiktok is familiar to em, so they are more inclined to trust it and its contents due to basic psychology. Familiarity breeds trust.

It scares me a bit..

[gikairan]

In a modern fantasy setting, magic users would be the most desirable computer programmers and you can't convince me otherwise

[atmosphericradar]

This is a very revealing moment for how the modern AI community is thinking:

The question now is whether passing the Turing test even matters anymore. “It’s totally unclear whether this is a meaningful milestone or not,” said Mustafa Suleyman, a founder of DeepMind, now a division of Google, and the founder of Inflection.Ai, a startup making personal AI assistants. “It doesn’t tell us anything about what the system can do or understand, anything about whether it has established complex inner monologues or can engage in planning over abstract time horizons, which is key to human intelligence.”

This is both fair criticism of the Turing Test, and nothing new. Turing himself didn't think his experiment was a good judge of intelligence, either. Where is Suleyman going with this?

Suleyman argues that there’s a misplaced focus in the tech industry on the distant possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI: algorithms with cognitive abilities that match or exceed humans’. Instead, he said the more achievable and meaningful short-term goal is what he calls Artificial Capable Intelligence, or ACI: programs that can set goals and achieve complex tasks with minimal human intervention.

To measure whether a machine has [become an] ACI, he describes a “modern Turing test” — a new north star for researchers — in which you give an AI $100,000 and see if it can turn the seed investment into $1 million. To do so, the bot must research an e-commerce business opportunity, generate blueprints for a product, find a manufacturer on a site like Alibaba and then sell the item (complete with a written listing description) on Amazon or Walmart.com.

This major C-suiter in the field of AI just said that the best test of a being's intelligence is exploiting business opportunities.

Obviously the final goal for all of the present-day investment into AI is to generate a financial return. It's no surprise that businesses would salivate over AI that can independently come up with, market, and sell new products all on their own.

But think about what that intelligence test says about the mindset of the big-wigs in AI right now! If the true test of human-like intelligence is being able to turn a 10x profit, what does that say about humans who don't (or can't) make tons of money? If your parents came to you one day and said: "we honestly think you're sub-human because you don't make enough money for how much money went into raising you", that would be prestige-drama-villain behavior.

Rich people think that they are smarter and better than everyone else. It's no surprise that, on a philosophical level, investment-capitalist tech bros will idolize (and seek to re-create) technological investment-capitalism.

I have my own thought experiment: I wonder how many of these Fintech C-suiters has rich parents that gave them huge loans or high-paying jobs right out of school, and I wonder how that affected them later in life...

[astyrra]

suggestion for improving tumblr

tl;dr: allow users to add “tags” to their blog as a whole, then make those searchable, so it’s easier to find people to follow who post/reblog about what you’re interested in

so, tumblr corporate wants to get new users/get occasional tumblr users to make an account and use it. as far as im concerned, that’s fine, as long as they don’t wreck the things existing tumblr users like about tumblr.

because all other social media is algorithmic garbage, it seems like a lot of new users join, don’t understand that they have to find people to follow themselves and/or don’t know where to start looking for people to follow, so they leave.

this is my proposed solution to that. basically, as well as having a url, icon, header image, etc, users can also add “tags” to their blog, describing what they post about. adding tags would be completely optional, and what they contain would be entirely written by blog owners with no algorithms involved.

either include in current search or make a new search for just this (and also just like. have a functional search lol). for new users have a thing pointing out that this exists and they should use it to find people to follow

this would also be useful for older users in that like. when i get into a new fandom i want to follow people who post about it frequently, but current search only shows me original posts about it - i also want to follow people who reblog a lot even if they don’t make original content

potential issues/solutions:

scammers and spammers: make it so u can’t add “tags” to ur blog until it reaches a certain age, or has a certain number of posts, or something, so they cant just create 100000 blogs at once and “tag” them all

people “tag” literally anything theyve ever been interested in even if they never really post about it: limit it to like, 5 “tags” total. possibly still some issues with people who forget to update theirs over time but id prefer that to algorithmic bullshit

people deliberately tagging themselves to trick others into following them for malicious reasons (eg someone who posts racist shit tags themselves as BLM or something bc they wanna hurt people): bannable offense. also tumblr fix moderation pls

[anghraine]

Happy Pride ;)

just some hands

[manmishra]

📢 WAR BY ALGORITHM! 🤖 AI is now controlling drones & cyber attacks 💣 Lethal autonomous weapons are real 🛰️ Robots & machines making battlefield decisions ⚔️ Human soldiers are being replaced 📡 War is becoming data-driven & unpredictable 🔍 Are we still in control—or is AI? 👉 Read how AI is rewriting the rules of combat #AIWarfare #MilitaryAI #FutureOfWar #AutonomousWeapons