Technology – Christopher Wink

The Technological Republic by Alex Karp

The freedom, peace and security that allowed Silicon Valley to flourish was quietly underwritten by an American military that these same Silicon Valley technologists are ambivalent about supporting.

Far from its origins in the Second World War, Silicon Valley focused on consumer technology, which gave it no greater ideal than profit and comfort. This must change, or so argues Alex Karp, the cofounder-CEO of the controversial defense contractor Palantir Technologies, in his new book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”

Why, asks Karp, are technologists and knowledge workers ambivalent about working to support invasive corporate advertising, but ardently opposed to (militaristically) defending the Free World?

Writing of Silicon Valley engineers, but no doubt thinking also of millions of other complacent American professionals: “They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella, but are responsible for none of its costs.”

Palantir and Karp are entwined with a techno-libertarianism that sounds increasingly unhinged: company cofounder Peter Thiel just recently gave a bizarre interview with the New York Times in which, among other quirks, he gave a long, extended pause when he was asked whether humanity “should” survive. Karp might respond the strength and security of the United States affords a diverse array of perspectives, including eccentric billionaires.

Karp reminds, though: “The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

We assume more information means we’ll like people more because the people we know best tend to be people we know the most about. For ages, we’ve predicted more and faster information would end war. But we forget the many people whom we spend less time with once we learn more about them.

This is a very normal human process that has been industrialized by social media. The “online disinhibition effect,” in which we share more online so there’s no small talk like neighbors but rather ” “deep cascading dissimilarity.” This is Wilder’s sense of proximity.

That’s from Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, a new book from journalist Nicholas Carr. As Carr writes: “By turning us all in the media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals.”

Chart communications technologies over time, and Carr says they came in three stages. First, the machines were just carriers (telephones, telegraph, early internet), then they began to exert editorial influence by social media algorithms curating, and now AI threats to also create the content. This gets us more and more, but runs in the “naive view of information” problem that historian Noah Yuval Harari has also argued: “Information has no essential link to truth,” and so more information does not necessarily lead to more truth.

Carr’s Superbloom is enjoyable and enlightening. I recommend it. Below my notes for future reference.

What happens to our digital remains after we die?

By 2100, the dead could outnumber the living on Facebook, and other social platforms like it.

Centuries of hiding the dead away may come to a close as our “digital remains” may keep our ancestors around us at all times. We ought to have a plan.

So argues the Oxford researcher Carl Öhman in his new book The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care.”

The book is a mix of philosophy, technology and information sciences. It’s rich, light, short and important. I recommend it. Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Singularity is Nearer

This generation of artificial intelligence bots have passed the famed Turing test, as we once knew it.

Experts may quibble with the rules, and we’ll continue to move the goal posts. Now, though, generative AI needs to play dumb to trick humans, because they move too fast, can write too convincingly and have too-comprehensive knowledge to be any person.

That’s from the new book from futurist Ray Kurzweil called “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”. It’s a followup to his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near.”

He’s among the best known, and longest-running champions of the kind of digital superintelligence that is called the singularity, which he says is coming — he estimates it by 2045, and has a bet with a friend that by 2029, AI will pass an even more rigorous Turing test he helped establish. His book is a wild romp of optimism and confidence. Anyone digging into the conversation will appreciate it. I recommend it.

Below I share notes for my future reference.

Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

An entrepreneur friend who fell deep into crypto mania said he hadn’t thought of it before.

The inevitability of crypto dominance that he predicted would be led by how traditional fiat currencies would fall out of favor. The thing about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, I told him, was that no military backed them. Tanks favor the status quo.

Now, as the founder of a tech-business publication, I always knew I needed a handle on blockchain, crypto and its myriad interwoven technologies, now increasingly labeled web3 and decentralization. So I still hold a small stash of bitcoin and ethereum, and I do hold an NFT, but I’ve always been prepared for them all to be priced at zero. That did help me better understand the world.

But that friend of mine had a hard fall. His stake in cryptocurrencies has so far fared better, but his portfolio of NFTs are essentially worthless today. It will always be a cautionary tale. And I bet the story isn’t done. Yet, the high-profile fall of the crypto exchange FTX and its boyish, one-time-billionare founder Samuel Bankman Fried was enough to spin an array of books – including one by a former coworker of mine. More recently, I read another account from journalist Zeke Faux, in his 2023 book “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Will AI be good or bad for journalism?

This answer Sam Altman gave TIME editor Sam Jacobs this month is pretty close to my stance too (clip here). That stance? With an over-supply of content, the differentiation will come from trust and high-quality relationships. That’s why I continue to bet on journalism, and local journalism at that.

What would it mean to build AI like octopuses, fungi or forests?

Framing intelligence as either the extractive corporate technological determinism kind or the pure human uniqueness kind is too limiting an understanding of intelligence. The world has far more kinds.

Artist and technologist James Bridle published in 2022 a compelling book called Ways of Being that reviewed research, themes and experiments in expanding our understanding of what technology can be. I recommend the book for others interested in a wider lens on AI and other advancements.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Culture of New Capitalism

The digital economy encourages each of us to be further individualized, quantified and atomized.

That’s a big theme from the 2006 book “The Culture of the New Capitalism” written by sociologist Richard Sennett. The nature of work and the organization of companies was shifting for decades but he spotted a marked shift he called “new capitalism.” This new form of capitalism is characterized by a focus on flexibility, innovation and the constant search for new markets and technologies.

Though 15 years old, the book is still relevant and serves as a good landscape of the academic research and philosophy that underpins an understanding of where we are today.

He argues that this shift led to a culture in which individuals are expected to adapt and learn in order to succeed, and so longterm commitments and relationships are devalued. The book is critical of how this new culture shifts individual identity and community, and the impact it has on social and economic inequality.

Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

The Age of AI

Artificial intelligence will be considered a new epoch in human history. The Enlightenment was defined by the age of reason, in which a process could ensure humans develop new and tested knowledge. Increasingly though, algorithmic learning is developing so rapidly that no human entirely understands the recommendations that AI makes. This will be seen as entirely new age.

So argues the Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a 2021 book written by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and AI researcher Daniel Huttenlocher. That big idea was argued in an article Kissinger wrote for The Atlantic in 2018 entitled: How the Enlightenment Ends.

The book is neither dystopian nor breathlessly optimistic. It is not full of rich stories nor colorful visions. It is a clear-eyed book directed toward policymakers and business leaders. It outlines its authors view of current research and understanding about where AI research is heading.

I collected notes from the book below. I recommend reading it.

J.C.R. Licklider and his Dream Machine of personal computing

We interact with computers to help us think.

Both in the transactional sense that these machines can help us solve math problems or search across a vast array of indexed information, and in the deeper sense that we can patter our own behaviors around how a computer solves a problem. This wasn’t always inevitable.

Before the invention of the keyboard, computer mouse and graphical interface, and certainly before the government-funded creation of the internet, computers were seen charitably as oversized and expensive calculators. They may seem today like an appliance that is as valuable to our quality of life as an indoor toilet or a heating system. It took vision to make the change.

The people (yes, especially a particular man) behind that vision is the focus of The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, a 2001 book by science journalist M. Mitchell Waldrop. The book tells the story of J.C.R. Licklider (1915-1990) and his role in the development of the modern personal computer. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist, was one of the pioneers of the concept of “interactive computing,” which envisioned a future in which computers would be accessible and easy to use for individuals, rather than just large institutions.