Are Tech Giants Cutting Corners and Putting Us All at Risk?
I’m very relieved that articles like this one from the Times are finally starting to appear. I’m resisting my salty sarcastic responses like, “No, really, ya think?” Or ones like this one where the headline reads:
AMAZON ABANDONS GROCERY STORES WHERE YOU JUST WALK OUT WITH STUFF AFTER IT TURNS OUT ITS “AI” WAS POWERED BY 1,000 HUMAN CONTRACTORS. IT WAS ALL SMOKE AND MIRRORS.
One of our intensely gifted people was yelling at me the other day about something he had said two weeks ago when it finally showed up in so-called MSM. “See, I told you! They are just slower than me. There is always a gap between what I say and when they write.” I said that gap is called “fact-checking.” We’ve all become so impatient, including myself. We might see some events and interpret them, and we may be right--but we don’t know and have to wait for those with the resources and budget to verify. Sometimes, people really do manipulate our views and withhold information for spin. Part of putting away childish things is realizing that is always part of the information equation. Never in all of human history has information existed without spin. I don't take scripture as history, but allegedly the first human was persuaded that a certain apple wasn't really what some deity said it was. It was a spin on the story about said apple given to his Boo. Sometimes, however, journalists and media outlets aren’t withholding to obsucre. They are waiting. To verify.
I’m very relieved because, like my impatient colleague, I’ve been talking about and writing things for a year or more that people have given me sideways glances about or have been completely ignoring for months, so much so that I started to wonder if maybe I have been going a little bit nutty. But it feels to me lately, at least in my little algorithmic echo chamber, people are waking up.
Where Can I Find DIY Tin Foil Hat Instructions?
A few months ago, a potential contractor and volunteer showed up, and we really liked him. However, over time, he started becoming uncomfortable with the conversations we were having internally about the instability of the Open AI model, the black box, lack of transparency, and the ominous feeling many of us felt about cut corners “and kluginess.” We also hold deep concerns about human rights violations and BPOs and the first whiff of OAI and Kenya had surfaced . We thought not enough people were talking about it. At first, he was intrigued. However, he started to act defensive suddenly, and words like “tinfoil hat” started coming up.
We had to laugh about that. We do horizon scanning and foresight, and we have members of our network who have been in the field of govtech and industry, some upwards of 25 years, and PhDs who have been studying both human and artificial intelligence for almost as long. We make hypotheses and guesses about what is coming up next. If I said we are always right, I would be lying. We are sometimes really wrong. We miss things. For example, I missed Anduril as a player in all of this for quite a long time. Sometimes our attention goes to the wrong things. Sometimes that’s because our attention is not always controlled in today’s world. Know this. Know you are not immune. Some consultancies use data platforms so they won’t miss. These platforms have code names like military operations do. They might think they are sophisticated and that we are low-tech. However, they never question the “tech” behind their oracular platforms because the platforms narcotize them with data porn. Charts that can be cut and paste into .ppt for their next board or pitch meeting. They never have to do thinking, fast or slow. That’s for dinosaurs and takes too much labor.
And they think we are the naive ones.
Returning to this potential volunteer, he wasn’t alone in acting like we might be radioactive or something. We have a tinfoil hat meme in our conversation boards because people call us that, and we call ourselves that, so we don’t take ourselves that seriously. This really smart uncle of mine used to say, if you want to fly, you have to take yourself lightly. But that’s the thing. We’re not really conspiracy theorists. We are just smart people who trust our own instincts more than what one of our volunteers calls the “pseudoprofundity” of consultant sales speak. We follow another simple rule: never lean into conspiracy as an explanation when simple incompetence will do. Or greed. (I think someone said capital is a conspiracy. I'm not anti-capitalist, truly. But I get that crony capitalism seems like that.) And we rarely even agree on what the facts as they appear mean. We do agree that a lot of the facts these days are obscured. We are a purple org. We've got Republicans and Democrats and Independents. We have people from several different countries. If we all agreed about the issues it would be worrisome.
What makes people the most suspicious is that we aren’t motivated by money. We need it as a means to do the things we want to do. All of us feel financial anxiety concerning our families and their well-being. But we know money is frequently the perverse incentive that leads otherwise good people into pretending they don’t see bad things. Let me tell you: if you've been working in tech, and you tell me you haven't seen fraud, recklessness, cybersecurity holes a mile wide, and other kinds of foolishness and mayhem, I'm worried for you. You might be sleep-walking to work every day. It's one thing to believe these are the consequences of risk-taking to do big things and make big money. It's another to claim you've never seen them.
To become ethically stronger, you have to start practicing resisting your impulses in small things. That way, you’ll be ready for the bigger ones. We aren’t taking fast, easy money now so that we might start the process of doing small good things consistently over time for their own sake. As an intelligent Greek fellow once said, excellence is a habit. We are what we repeatedly do.
However, remember: even really smart people, even really smart ancient Greek people, get taken in by cult leaders.
What does Hubermann say about the prefrontal angular cingulate cortex?
What’s kind of funny is within the “hustle bro” circuit, where perverse incentive is the reason to get up in the morning, there is a theme about stoicism, practicing discipline, and doing hard things. People are throwing out terms like pre-frontal angular cingulate cortex and telling people to marinate their junk in ice-cold baths and fast. The main promulgator of this evangelicalism is an eye doctor who moonlights as a neuroscience guru. (The eye is indeed attached to the brain most directly of all the senses, but if you are a little surprised to hear that he’s an eye doctor and not a neuroscientist, that’s understandable.)
You’ve probably heard about the scandal concerning Huberman. He rose to visibility at the same time I started writing a neuroscience column for Rainn Wilson’s now- defunct SoulPancake. A lot of us in school in the '90s got excited because the data volume coming from the new MRI, CAT, and PET scans was reaching toward actual tangible insight. We all waxed ecstatic over brains. One of the first articles I wrote for Wilson was the fact that if you wanted to get more clicks for an article and impress people, multivariate user testing demonstrated that putting a brain scan image at the head of the article made the reader believe it’s content more and rate the author as more intelligent and credible. In the 90s, our brains fell in love with images of themselves.
Hubermann’s slick clickbait made me gravitate away from building that column. I moved from there toward other things. Watching this, however, is something else entirely. He and many other influencers are very keen on building up strength and resilience in young men. It’s a cultural phenomenon I am interested in. But all the time, he is telling them to take ice baths and fast; he isn’t telling them to do the really hard things.
Like taking the modest, steady job as a teacher or construction worker, a primary care provider who keeps a small independent family practice, or a baseball coach in a small town little league that includes the kid with Down. Or even a small local business that wants to make good food for everyday people but stays small and tries as much as we can to imperfectly do good.
Instead, he is telling them that they need to take ice baths and measure their sleep so they can endlessly pursue that “passive income” that will ultimately give them the freedom to pursue what they want, and to hell with that cingulate cortex, pre- or post-, frontal or anterior.
Here is the truth. Any passive income (with the exception of some kinds of real estate) is rarely, if ever, truly passive. There is always some mechanism by which you are enslaving others. Some influencers, with their work 2 hours a week and base jump in Bora Bora religion, pump automated platforms and virtual assistants as if they were getting paid for it. And come on. He probably was.
What were the working conditions for offshore virtual assistants that had to be scaled up like Stanley insulated cups to meet the demands?
In the meantime, stay curious and care about things. It’s the only way we survive.
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