At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology: Well, of course! Did anyone expect thoughtful response? The people who run the big A.I. companies believe that they are so rich and powerful that they can do anything they want, and don’t require public support to do it. Time will tell if they are correct.
A lot happened in 2016. It would be easy to imagine that the entire reason for this change was the election of Donald Trump as president, and to stop looking for other causes, but something else also happened which I think we should at least consider, and that other thing says something important about how social media and human psychology interact.
In March 2016 Twitter completed their transition to the algorithmic feed, meaning that it was the default for all users to have their timeline populated by what Twitter thought they would want to see, rather than a chronological feed of posts from people they had decided to follow.
Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical.
The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and am listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Six years ago, I called for the Gandalf Option — and now I see that Pope Leo has endorsed my call. I admit that he didn’t mention me by name, but come on, the debt is obvious.
Disney was an early adopter of a then-struggling technology called Technicolor: you can see it in the landmark shorts “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) and “The Grasshopper and the Ants” (1935). But while the artwork and animation in those films are first-rate by the standards of the time, they haven’t aged very well. Contrast them to “The Old Mill” (1937) — which looks gorgeous even today. What happened? The animators were working on the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and they were learning on the job at an astonishing rate. “The Old Mill” appeared just six weeks before Snow White; it was a harbinger.
I do love a new version of BBEdit, but what I love even more is reading Bare Bones’s release notes. E.g. “Made some small changes to improve performance of the tag balancer in pathological cases.” — Ah yes, those “pathological cases.”
Fascinating tidbit from David Thomson’s biography of David O. Selznick: When Selznick heard what the studio did to The Magnificent Ambersons, he tried to get the original footage donated to the Museum of Modern Art (357). There’s no citation for this claim, however; I assume Thomson’s source was Irene Selznick, DOS’s first wife, whom Thomson interviewed at great length. If the story is true, which I doubt, DOS showed remarkable foresight; and of course if he had managed it, an artistic tragedy would have ben averted.
Michael Feldstein on the implications of the Canvas hack:
Let’s be clear: This was not some rando script kiddie waltzing through a wide-open back door. The hackers used multiple attack vectors, including Canvas’s open course sites, their help desk software, and social engineering through a help desk call. Instructure is SOC 2 compliant, meaning they’ve had intrusive third-party security audits. The criminals wanted Instructure to let the public know the name of their organization and the fact that they returned the data after the ransom was paid. Why? Advertising. The criminals wanted future victims to know that paying the ransom gets them something in return. Selling students’ private information to the internet isn’t their business model. They’re cyber kidnappers.
This is organized crime. They want us to know that, when they come for us, on whatever platform they attack next, we should pay them.