Overview: Politics

"The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists."Establishes the metaphor with a story about “scientific forestry” - the late 18th century growth hacking technique that "made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer rel…

My mid November 2024 newsletter summarises how a deep dive into Bluesky has changed how I view #AI4Communities, and summarises some of the most influential things I've read recently.

Bluesky's announcement of their open-sourcing of "Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool... individuals and teams can work together to review and label content", coupled with the ability for people and communities to "run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app".This enables &…

According to Mark Zuckerberg, "Consumers no longer control their social-media feeds. Meta’s algorithm... is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with... future feeds [will] show you “content that’s generated by an A.I. system.”" Fortunately, "Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and …

"I rarely work for the same client for more than a year or two - generally enough to help them figure out their strategy, pilot and demonstrate it, and set up the team to mainstream it. But I make an exception for the Joint Research Centre"A few slides, repurposed for LinkedIn, setting out "some of the key innovations underpinning t…

"Only people can trust, but only machines scale well. Today’s websites and apps are built to compensate for an absence of trust, rather than to support its growth."Instead we have the 'I accept' button: "we know we are lying the moment we touch it, as does the author of the legalese no one expects anyone to read. Navigatin…

Classic example of a negative view on LinkedIn: "Unlike many others, I don’t think any reinforcement learning or reward algorithm is at play... appears to be a generic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process that breaks tasks into several steps... Subsequent steps ... generated based on context... subsequent interactions concatenated into the context.…

"The most common AI-based functionalities in participation tools are toxicity screening, analysis of inputs and translation. The first two in particular are meant to lighten the workload" of community managers."Toxicity screening ... is used to flag hateful or inappropriate inputs." Text is usually flagged and post-moderated, b…

"As AI-generated content blurs the line between human and machine online, “model collapse” might help us find new value in well-managed human communities."

An interesting take: governments should ensure "that news outlets, digital platforms, and political leaders provide the best available knowledge" and enshrine a new to not "be lied to by the powerful" in a world optimised for enragement: "one study showing that each additional negative word in a headline increased the clic…

The EU "risks falling behind because of incoherent and complex regulation", but there's an opportunity: "open-source AI—models whose weights are released publicly with a permissive licence... ensures power isn’t concentrated among a few large players... creates a level playing field".Europe has more open-source developers…

Good piece on how "the free speech warriors... [behind] Truth Social and the ... decay of Twitter ... the “Festung” cities of unrestricted expression... still not happy... shouting into an echo chamber isn’t nearly as satisfying as they thought it would be... What they’re really after ... is our attention... The thrill of provocation quickly…

Profile of New_Public, founded by Eli Pariser of Filter Bubble and Upworthy fame, and Deepti Doshi "from from Meta, where she’d spent much of her tenure leading the company’s Community Partnerships... supporting, Facebook group admins... as well as UT Austin professor Talia Stroud, who remains on the board, and their drive to stimulate "…

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure's manifesto sets out the three legs upon which an open public sphere must rest.

Michael Foster's "top ten unfinished building blocks" are:trust & safety: "heart of an ethical social web... [currently] delegated to a small group of volunteers... [but] green shoots emerging"spam filters: "there are some amazing tools now... Pixelfed has shown what can be done"safe spaces / bridging & f…

"A deep dive into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone", over 20 years later, by "former New_ Public Research Fellow Serena Chao".Social capital, according to Putnam, "is the “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”... [making] a strong case for a…

Anuj Ahooja asks, on Threads' first birthday, the "existential question... Why does Threads exist? ... an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But ... a platform can't exist to be "an alternative." It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose... [unfortunat…

"GPT-4o ... talk to users in a much more lifelike way — detecting emotions in their voices, analyzing their facial expressions and changing its own tone and cadence depending on what a user wants... It sounded more humanlike than some humans I know."And it's fast: it's “native multimodal support” means it can "take in aud…

Interesting ideas but innocent of how they could create as much harm as good."The internet caters to our baser interests... like wanting to be healthy, but finding yourself in a food court where the only options are burgers and milkshakes. What option do we have but to be our baser selves?... But what if we created an arena of virtue ... wou…

"Could AI itself be used to imagine and build new institutions, so we can better collaborate, govern, and live together?... hope to inspire and engage researchers and practitioners to build AI that improves our societal institutions."The site includes 8 (so far) “Project Cards that showcase ideas for projects that have come out of our wo…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

Earlier this week I used an excerpt from a chat with Philip Weiss & Jesús Azogue as a starting point for a conversation with ChatGPT about some of the content in my Hub.

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

Asks: could LLMs be used to "create tools that sift and summarize scientific evidence for policymaking... [for] knowledge brokers providing presidents, prime ministers, civil servants and politicians with up-to-date information on how science and technology intersects with societal issues... [who must] nimbly navigate ... millions of scientif…

One of my favourite writers in this area on AGI risks. "It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts... Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization... beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as…

"an initial analysis of a growing movement ... to make key machine learning tools and technologies open and shared. “Open Artificial Intelligence”...BLOOM is a large language model released under RAIL – a new copyright license that combines an Open Access approach to licensing with behavioral restrictions aimed to enforce a vision of responsi…

While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.

How can a reasonably conservative corner of the European Commission adopt M365?

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

The 3rd part of my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts looks at how AI could turbocharge collective intelligence "and finance the resulting ecosystem, providing an alternative to Big Tech AI monopolies".