Lecturer at @UCBerkeley in ISF. Research on AI, algorithms, organizations, work, labor, and expertise. Writing at https://teapawt.org/t.co/HoZfMecSz6.
Berkeley, CA
Joined May 2008
- Tweets2.4K
- Following599
- Followers754
- Likes4.9K
Great episode from @WSITYpod and a model for how contentious issues like the tradeoffs of non-pharmaceutical interventions should be conducted. Wish they had gotten to vaccines. This is going into my course readings. Watch it here: youtube.com/watch?v=ZCWQ-qJT…
We're recording our first live show at @WashU on October 27th 4 CDT. We'll be joined by @BhadeliaMD , @davidzweig, Katherine Wells, and Jeff Hutt to unpack what we should do when the next pandemic hits.
Register to view the conversation live here: washu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form…
What can the open-weight AI movement learn from the history of the open-source? I cover open-source from its informal beginnings at the dawn of UNIX to Stallman's "free software" and LINUX to its christening as "open source" and to "cloud computing" which changed everything.
The short answer is that ends matter and advocates of open weight AI are interested in it for different reasons.
Link: computingandsociety.substack…
Of possible interest to: @natolambert @binarybits @STS_News and of course, thanks to @beenwrekt whose original blogpost got me started.
Oct 15 would have been Michel Foucault’s 100th birthday. I thought I would re-up my post on him. While the post is critical of him to some extent, I hope it also conveys my belief that he gave the best answer to the question of “what is modernity?” computingandsociety.substack…
I finally listened to the first season of “Sold A Story” and loved everything but the framing. computingandsociety.substack…. It is NOT a story about science but about the long-running conflict in American education about standardization and teacher autonomy. Cc: @bjfr @PhilOnEdTech
Shreeharsh Kelkar retweeted
On Substack, I summarize my new book Gender Identity: The Career of a Category and reply to a mini-symposium on the book hosted by @dan_oppenheimer, with great contributions by @scritic and @BloggerGideon. substack.com/home/post/p-219…
Yes, we live in a mass society full of complex systems that require work to be "aligned" with each other because the world is full of people with different interests and goals. LLMs mean setting up more new complex systems. It's not work that ever stops. People need to chill out.
Don't really think alignment is "solvable" anymore so than the alignment of human beings—complex systems with hard-to-measure utility functions and an incentive to dissemble when studied—is "solvable."
"With enough research and reprogramming we can simply make an intelligence behave perfectly ethically" is quite literally communist thinking.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_So…
I reviewed Rogers Brubaker's Gender Identity: The Career of a Category for Eminent Americans. danieloppenheimer.substack.c…
Good review of Rogers Brubaker’s “Gender Identity: The Career of a Category.” danieloppenheimer.substack.c…
Shreeharsh Kelkar retweeted
delighted by the very thoughtful review of my new book Gender Identity: The Career of a Category by Shreeharsh Kelkar @scritic
danieloppenheimer.substack.c…
On the Eminent Americans Substack, I wrote a rather long review of @wrbucla's excellent new book "Gender Identity: The Career of a Category," a concise and precise book that does a great job laying out the history of the category. danieloppenheimer.substack.c…
New post: Anthropomorphism is built into the DNA of AI; it is literally about what AI people do. It's hard to eliminate it but it would be good to be careful about the terms themselves. Post draws on AI history and the work of Phil Agre. computingandsociety.substack…
New post on the data center backlash. I agree with @AndyMasley that the data center backlash is about data centers but its cause seems to be progressives’ disenchantment about big tech in the 2010s for a variety of reasons. computingandsociety.substack…
I also draw on @jasminewsun excellent reporting to highlight another factor that has made the backlash so real which is the decline of mass organizations and the rise of ideological issue entrepreneurs.
Shreeharsh Kelkar retweeted
Has the Turing Test been rendered obsolete? It depends on how you interpret the test: as a test of second-order social norms (no) or as a test of language performance (yes). More in my latest blogpost: computingandsociety.substack…
