@evan Radical Cities by Justin McGuirk? (My notes from it at http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/urbanism/blog_all_dogeared_pages_radical_cities_by_justin_mcguirk.html)

Or @abpowell's Undoing Optimization for more tech (again, my notes at http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/urbanism/blog_all_dogeared_pages_undoing_optimization_by_alison_b_powell.html)

Fenwick @fenwick is kicking off our AI symposium @Milieux_news. Let’s use #unstable23 as hashtag, ok? 2 days of promising talks ahead of us: https://machineagencies.milieux.ca/unstable-diffusions/, incl @abpowell, Lucy Suchman, @bhaggart, @Mayameme, …

The Chancellor of the Exchequer getting hit for multiple millions in settlement to avoid prosecution for tax evasion while in charge of Boris Johnson's government's finances, gagging the press with threats of SLAPP lawsuits, and being up to his eyeballs in a crooked speculative finance bubble over PPE gear during COVID, is absolutely on point for the Conservatives.

Like putting a libertarian bankster and private medical speculator in charge of the NHS.

Theirs is a parliament of thieves.

@FractalEcho hmmm we thought about this in the JUST AI project https://just-ai.net. We used gaps and sparse places in social network analysis of publications to think about who and what wasn’t there (as much).

Everyone (/unspecified loved ones) still whining about Covid only killing people with pre-existing conditions inspired me to Google how many humans have basically*nothing* wrong with them. The Lancet says less than five percent.

Maybe nobody needs to check their ableist privilege. 🤔

Climate change is already threatening the data centers required to power large scale tech, like "AI".

Or, accounting for climate we see a tech future that's patchier & less always-on + ubiquitous, NOT larger and more powerful.

This doesn't mean that those with power to shape and control tech will themselves grow less powerful. But it does mean that the colloquial Moore's law fantasies of tech, particularly popular in "AI", will face a series of hard stops. @mel_hogan

@KatrinaMatheson @Mer__edith @mel_hogan very interested in this! I teach around these topics. And research too I guess

@Mer__edith @mel_hogan Yes. I just wrote a paper (for a class - PhD student here) about how AI and Climate Change represent emerging epistemes in direct opposition.

"I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. “That’s easy,” he replied. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”"
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-stay-or-go-the-lack-of-solid-facts-means-it-s-all-a-leap-of-faith-a3189151.html

@RDBinns @elonjet lol but I remain unpersuaded that transparency is going to really shift power. I am willing to accept ‘every bit helps’ tho

@TheCybermatron in excluding the word ‘mastodon’? or more broadly? i didn’t come up with the phrase originally but i did search out amusing domains…

Ahhhhh The Red Scholar's Wake in the Guardian!
"Beyond the love story, there are more traditional space opera goings-on: power struggles, political manoeuvring, betrayals and discoveries, and many incidental pleasures provided by the detailed, vividly realised settings."
https://t.co/ZKI5i6qt3i
#theRedScholarsWake #spaceopera #romance #LesbianSpacePirates #sapphic #sapphics #lesbians

My colleague Chenshu Zhou organized an amazing conference – "Temporal Mediations in Digital Capitalism," ft @atg_dbp, @medieninitiativ, @KatherineGroo, Pamela Lee, and many other amazing ppl – at @Penn on Feb 11 https://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/events/2023/02/11/wolf-conference-2023-temporal-mediations-digital-capitalism

“They put on makeup and sit for the test, bearing the identities of their clients. (‘The proctors are usually foreigners,’ Wang said. ‘Foreigners are not that sensitive towards the facial features of Chinese people.’)”

https://restofworld.org/2022/chinese-software-cheat-sat-exams/

"it would be hard to find a single discipline in the “social sciences” that wasn’t at least in some way helped along by Ford money, from international studies (funded CENIS at MIT) and area studies ($270 million to thirty-four universities for area and language studies from 1953—1966),13 urban economics,14 and GIS (supported the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory of Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis)" (many echoes of Jen Light's work here!) https://kevinrogan.substack.com/p/urban-studies-for-conspiracy-theorists?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=484115&post_id=90905438&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Friend and brilliant woman in tech ethics engineering @jdeitchman kindly alerted me to the fact that I’ve been chosen as one of this year’s 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. Considering the genius friends and colleagues who’ve been honored before, I couldn’t be more humbled or thrilled.

https://medium.com/women-in-ai-ethics/announcing-the-100-brilliant-women-in-ai-ethics-list-for-2023-a97538a9056f

What does it mean for junior scholars to work in the heavily industry funded field of "AI Ethics"? - Os Keyes
& I draw from our PhD experiences to detail tricky choices, no-win situations, and friendship & feminist refusal as ways forward in this new paper. https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/EconomiesofVirtueINC2022TOD46-2.pdf

#fundingmatters #artificialinteligence #AI #feministrefusal #PhD #ethics #owningethics

@C__CS thank you so much for this. I have for the past few years been trying to think about how to mobilise and facilitate immanent critique of data and AI ethics, which has been a journey of contingent tactical choices, making of space for connection, and a strange alienation from being ‘close to the power’ of tech and government. I see echoes of my journey and the JUST AI project that carried it in your work. Let’s talk more abt #feministrefusal #care #ethics

Thanks to all the editors for making this book on Economies of Virtue come together — it’s all open access so check it out!