AI, ETHICS AND DEMOCRACY

I keep reading that AI is dumb, dangerous and demented. And I’ve no doubt it’s all true. Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence, describes ChatGPT as “a very elaborate auto complete like you have on your phone”

AI slop is contaminating our lives with worthless junk, and while I’ve played with and been briefly amazed and entertained by Google NotebookLM’s auto-generated podcast creations, they can get repetitive, boring and stupid very quickly.

We can rail against AI all we want, but it’s not going away. I expect AI to get smarter and to have fewer hallucinations even if the danger level remains high.

What is Al good for?

Micro.blog uses Al to generate Alt-Text descriptions of images and that seems to work well enough for its intended purpose. What it can’t do, of course, is generate descriptions that are personal to the uploader or post context, e.g., if I have a picture of my son the description will be a generic “boy with curly hair” or such like.

I’ve used Google’s Gemini on blog posts I’ve written and it’s given me some very positive feedback about my writing, enough to make me feel good about myself (certainly much more so than any human reader). Although it also got into the habit of creating its own alternative versions, which often were funnier and more interesting (to me) than my own writing. (It will also roast you if that’s your thing.)

Similarly, Google NotebookLM has fed back on my entire year of posts in 2024, and was very nice about it, too. It is quite therapeutic to hear that, as long as you take it for what it is - an elaborate auto-complete that ultimately will rot your brain, take your job and ruin your life.

I’ve also used both for work in some limited ways - drafting a job description, drafting cases for support for funding applications, and summarising or analysing documents. Both require some degree of human intervention, but the process and product was useful in helping me get started, and complete the tasks.

One area where I found Al to be most interesting was in commenting on and forming an ethical response to a local democracy issue where I live. I found the response to be in line with what community campaigners (including me) had been asking for, and in total contrast to the response from our elected representatives, authorities and business leaders. That must be the auto-complete.

While I don’t think I would yet call for all politicians to be replaced by AI, I do wonder if there is a potential use case here for analysing policy implications, or at least highlighting ethical considerations?

I ran these thoughts past Claude.ai and this is a summary of what it had to say:

• democratic processes need human judgment, accountability, and the ability to balance competing interests the ways that AI currently cannot
• core ethical principles that should guide public service:
• transparency about conflicts of interest
• accountability to the people
• clear acknowledgment of problems rather than minimisation
• practical solutions for reporting complaints and response
• the fundamental duty of public officials to serve their constituents

Human decision-makers can, of course, choose to prioritise other interests over ethical imperatives

I suggested to it that the AI response to the Southall Gasworks issue demonstrated more “empathy” than the human political response:

• The AI’s response prioritised human wellbeing and acknowledged suffering, in contrast to the actual political response, which was bureaucratic and dismissive, treating hundreds of complaints as isolated incidents and prioritising procedural responses over human impact
• A truly empathetic human response to such serious health impacts should have been immediate and decisive action to protect public health

Of course, the AI response wasn’t actually empathetic. It applied logical ethical principles that prioritise human wellbeing. What looks like empathy is actually systematic ethical reasoning unclouded by personal interests, political considerations, or institutional self-protection.

I suggested that it might not be uncommon for political leaders to lack empathy, and that it’s therefore so much easier for them to allow personal, and powerful political and institutional interests to take precedence over what most ordinary people would see quite clearly as the interests of human wellbeing:

This connects to research on the prevalence of psychopathic traits in leadership positions. In the Southall Gasworks case, a leader with normal empathetic capacity might find it psychologically difficult to:

• dismiss hundreds of health complaints from suffering residents
• accept substantial gifts while community members develop serious illnesses
• continue business as usual while learning of deaths potentially linked to their decision

Of course, even someone with empathy might not be able to resist powerful institutional or financial pressures.

BOOM! Figured out how to turn off automatic blog post thumbnails. (Wrap <!-- --> around the thumbnail stuff in index.html.)

On a roll, but should quit while I’m ahead.

Finally figured out how to use the Lite Youtube embed plugin.

In settings, replaced “post-content” with “post__content”. (This maybe unique to my Anatole theme.)

Now instead of no videos showing in my blog posts, every video is displayed twice.

🤦‍♂️

Spent half the day trying to force @robb@social.lol’s YouTube Lite plugin to work on my site, but have conceded failure. I thought I had it working at one time (and it definitely worked on my test-blog), so deleted all the YT shortcodes I’d been using previously. Gah.

THIS YEAR

This year I’m returning to full-time work for the first time in almost a decade. I’m looking forward to it, though, and my main focus is going to be on researching and writing grant funding applications for local community youth work.

Last term I joined my sons' school’s parent teacher association specifically to help find grant funding they can apply for. I need to get on with that.

I also hope to be able to get more involved (again) in local democracy and activism in person. I’d like to see if we can get some kind of organised mutual aid and self-help community going.

I want to get fitter and lose some weight, so I’m intend to walk every morning (flat feet permitting) and I’m no longer taking sugar in tea and coffee.

I want to sleep better (which is partly dependent on little kid staying in his own bed all night), breathe better, and get my psoriasis under control.

And I want a new hat.

Last year I feel like I tried out some new ways of doing things that make my life better.

• journaling
• reading more
• listening to music more
• being more sociable online, less time on X
• writing (and publishing/sharing) more
• eating less red meat and more beans/pulses instead
• walking more regularly

Big kid has been enjoying CrossFit exercises at school and at home.

Big kid: “Hey Google! What’s an air squat?”

Google: “An escort is a call girl or a prostitute….”

Me: “Hey Google! STOP!!!”

After numerous attempts at therapising my toaster (“WTF is wrong with you, you stupid machine!") I realised that it was too depressed to talk.

I put myself in the toaster’s shoes and realised it was burnt out. It was full of crumbs (golden memories of bagels, crumpets, muffins and waffles past). Attempted arson was simply its way of communicating that it couldn’t take any more.

I unreservedly apologise to my toaster for this gross defamation.

Toast in the Machine davidmarsden.info

TOAST IN THE MACHINE

Some people seem to find the idea of machine intelligence frightening. And with good reason. Because from where I’m sitting at the breakfast table, the machines around me are mostly dumber than a rock (although that’s a bit unfair to rocks, who are actually very smart).

• My music player has forgotten my wifi name and password and refuses to reconnect.

• My wife’s work laptop is making all kinds of noises trying to attract her attention, oblivious to the fact that she’s not here, and hasn’t been for a good ten minutes.

• There’s our microwave. So many buttons, settings and options. We use it several times a day and only ever tell it to heat food or drink for x number of seconds or minutes. But it’s brainless, and if you don’t keep an eye on it like a small child it will spill your drink or chuck food everywhere.

• My kettle sits quietly now, but I know that when I go to boil water for my tea later it will keep on boiling the water until I manually switch it off, despite all its various settings for different bail temperatures and offers to the keep the water warm.

• And then there’s the expensive toaster. Another one like the kettle that promises to toast (or defrost) every possible variety of bread-based product on its own individual setting, and with six settings for how brown you want it. Wonderful! The grim reality is that there are just two settings. “Untoasted “and “Set the smoke alarm off”.

I’m showing my space-obsessed four year old pictures of Pluto taken by a telescope on a spaceship launched from Earth twenty years ago and I still can’t get a toaster that can do somewhere in between soft, cold bread and cremation.

We shouldn’t laugh. We think Al is dumb, but we elect dumber, and Al will only get less dumb (and more dangerous).

How long before The Mossad detonates my toaster?

In fact, eighteen years ago (I mean, really?) I bought the cheapest toaster I could find in Argos for £10. I plugged it in, put in my rounds of bread and pressed play. Two minutes later, the plastic surround had literally melted.

I would go back to holding a toasting fork over an open fire, but/as my kids point out every Xmas) we don’t have a chimney.

ON JOURNALING

I wrote this a week ago.

My last journal was over a week ago, last Saturday.

I’ve had a week off work with a really bad cough, wheezing, shortness of breath. Generally feeling better these last couple of days, but also still coughing. Last two days I had coughing fits in the afternoons leaving me dizzy, and exhausted. I haven’t slept well some nights either, due to coughing, wheezing and breathlessness.

But sitting here right now, I feel as good as I have done in two weeks or more.

Time off from work has allowed me to go through 90 days of journal entries to categorise and summarise them, and then outline or tease out the key themes or ideas in each area of interest. Why? Well, 1) what are all these journal entries for? I mean, I get the process, but am I missing out on something greater? 2) Lots of people publish weekly summaries and some people like reading them. But why?

I think I get it now. Doing this work has made sense of a lot of daily, weekly and monthly events, habits, routines, scenarios, relationships, that otherwise would have remained loosely connected, strung together like the Christmas lights every year when you take them out of the box you left them in in January. In a mess, tangled up, half working. Better than nothing, but a lot of stress.

And another surprising fact. While I started - and soon stopped - journaling in March, then restarted in August, I had wondered if spending the time to write in a private journal would take away from writing for my blog? Actually (and unsurprisingly, really) the opposite has occurred. I have written more than ever, privately and publicly.

I’ve also generally felt better in myself, although I’ve still had my usual ups and downs, and I’m still quite easily uplifted and dragged down.

It’s also made me realise I do a lot more things than I imagined, and do them OK.

It’s helped me to better understand some of my relationships, particularly with family.

I’m reading more, and listening to music more.

It would be useful (although perhaps less fun)to do the same exercise with my work journal. (41 pages, 46 days).

244 pages over 90 days for my personal journal.

Unfortunately, I haven’t journaled since.

Every time someone mentions Croissant (for cross-posting) I hear big kid’s Mum telling him, “You can’t have croissants for breakfast every morning!”

I wrote 300 pages of notes and reflections in my personal and work journals in 90 days.

DIGITAL LEADER

Hoping we found a good solution to help big kid’s Digital Leader application.

He found it difficult to focus and get his head around answering the questions in a sensible (let alone helpful) way.

Instead, I recorded him speaking about the devices and tech he uses, how he helps his little brother and his parents to play games, and how using new apps like Duolingo has helped him to learn Spanish (when previously he hated Spanish lessons).

Google automatically transcribed his speech and copied it to Google Docs. There I edited out the ums and ahs and pasted it into his Discord chat with me. Then he copied it out by hand on to the application form.

🤞

Finally figured out how to add @sod’s Search-Space and Surprise-Me plug-ins to my micro.blog.

(It requires adding the full URL as the page content.)

H/t to @Manton!

Search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts.

I forgot the link! https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

Thanks @pruvisto for such a nice tool.

Why are toasters and smoke alarms still so stupid?