@RoboRev @scottsantens I'm not an economist, just an educational researcher/statistician, but this article seems to suggest that if the UBI is fully funded by taxes, the distribution of income becomes more compressed around the "middle" (doesn't specify mean, median, etc) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3920748 by raising the income of the lowest and reducing the income of the highest. This could result in inflated costs on goods and services in the middle range, but not at the lowest level, as there would be less demand there. If everyone could afford at least rice and beans and a studio apartment, and knew that there was simply no way they or their kids could be turned out to the street and left to starve, we might even see less inflationary pressure, since there is no actual shortage of most basic goods (except housing, but that isn't evenly distributed geographically). #UBI
March 19 #LAK24 I attended a great workshop on #DataStorytelling in #LearningAnalytics facilitated by Gloria Milena Fernandez-Nieto and Vanessa Echeverria. A range of interesting workshop papers were presented, many involving AI, from ways to gather data for storytelling to ways to present data to users with visualizations, narratives, etc. We had productive group discussions at the end, identifying future work directions related to new tools, ethics, and especially trustability. LLMs by themselves will not turn data into a valid story— they need to be backed by tools that incorporate pedagogical intent, domain knowledge, and an understanding of the questions different roles are interested in. One particular discussion has stayed with me — when we tell a story, we introduce a point of view by definition. How can we ensure this point of view is aligned with the needs and benefit of participants?
@camerondotca I suppose they won’t be much worse than the multiple choice questions humans usually write… ;)
@martin #OpenAI and the other commercial providers are operating under the definition: "If we can access it, it's public, and anything we want to do with it is fair use." Their customers and investors clearly have no objection, so only regulation has any chance of getting this horse back into the barn. (I think the barn has burned down, fallen over, and sunk into a swamp.)
@aral @littletree Is the objection to the requirement to give the medical provider (or another necessary service provider) A) a realtime contact method, B) a phone number, C) a mobile phone/text number, D) an app registration on a "smart" phone, or E) an app registration on a duopoly "smart" phone that collects data from its "customers"? (I will grant you there are few practical differences between D and E at present.) I think A is reasonable, though.
@jasonpettus I admire the effort. It may not be possible to truly reduce the use of dark patterns with legislation. If we could get "reputable" vendors to stop using them, they would at least become a more obvious tell that one is dealing with a disreputable vendor to be avoided.
@martin Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels have many levels of machine sentience, generally benign (at least to benign neighbors). I think the character “Mike” in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a good example of the challenges in developing awareness without a body, particularly the dependence on social interaction (even if the tech Heinlein described seems hopelessly simplistic now). It might be possible for something we philosophically recognize as “intelligence” to develop without a body or socialization, but I don’t know if we’d be able to communicate with it. We would have almost no shared referents.
@futzle @jaystephens @liamvhogan It’s funny, when I read Dune as a teen, I interpreted it as “scrappy rebel underdogs beat nasty corrupt empire (to be fair, the original Star Wars had just hit theaters). Only in re-reading it later did I realize that it is a tragedy. Yes, there are very dated elements, but the essential story of the disaster inherent in a monopoly/scarcity economy (with an assist from powerful religious groups who assume they know what’s best for everyone) is still there. I have some of the same mixed feelings about many of the books I loved then (Tolkein’s inherently evil orcs, Heinlein’s uncritical libertarianism, etc.) I still enjoy reading them for the good in them, but with a more critical eye.
One more week to #LAK24! As a co-chair of the Practitioner’s Track, I can tell you we have some outstanding presentations of real-world implementations of #LearningAnalytics on tap, as well as cutting edge research and fantastic workshops. Not to mention great conversations and networking. Hope you can join us in Kyoto or online! https://www.solaresearch.org/events/lak/lak24/
I'm having a great conversation later today about #learninganalytics at scale with people in the trenches with actual implementations: https://lnkd.in/eiVm-PvS All are welcome!
@dajb I'm not opposed to CW as a practice. (I try not to post anything that would require it, because I don't need that in my life.) And people who object to using CW would probably post in the wrong forum areas, too... but then they could be banned from that forum without banning them from the entire platform. Or a forum feature can allow one user to hide the posts of another from their own view (quoted posts do get tricky to manage). I'm just coming back to participating in single-stream social media and I'm not sure it's the right tool for me with or without CW.
@dajb I think this is a problem intrinsic to a single-stream feed as opposed to a topic-based forum. Everyone has different interests, but when you follow someone, you get everything. Professional posts, hobbies, politics, activism, etc. This leads to services offering algorithms to curate feed streams. I suppose if we are the ones controlling the algorithms, rather than the services, it wouldn't be so bad, but that still leads to bubbles and echo chambers. One can follow hashtags instead, but people forget to use them and there is FOMO that a new interesting tag might appear. Forums with topics encourage mindful selection of audience, at least. #hashtagsNotEnough
A person who is an expert in a technology is not necessarily an expert in democracy. A lot of very bright people have trouble understanding the scope of their brilliance.
@dajb The thing is, Twitter was a commercial enterprise from the start. It's great that people were able to subvert it to form communities over time, but that was always threatened on a platform owned by someone else.
@martin I love what Hugging Face is doing to democratize artificial intelligence through #opensource and #openscience. :) I also have concerns, however. Their documentation seems oddly silent about making sure one has the right to share data included in datasets (e.g. the person sharing is the author or has permission of anyone whose data is included). Numerous questions about this have gone unanswered in the huggingface forums, or have been met with hostility. The community seems to be a mix of academics (who have IRB protocols they already follow) and hackers who think all information should be free (presumably even my and your personal health details). I know you are no fan of #copyright and I have criticisms of it as well. I think the way forward is to have reasonable discussions about policies and standards as a community that respect #privacy and acknowledge the effort that goes into creating #originalcontent needed to feed the models.
@martin Absolutely agree #opensource #distributedcomputing #inspectableAI models should be a developmental goal. Perhaps it could be built on or designed like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing Privacy settings would allow users to decide what to share with the model, and every user decides how much of their "spare" computing power to contribute to training the model. Even people whose only device is a phone can participate.
@martin Also, in case I wasn’t clear, I meant writing the six word prompts themselves. Writing something that short and powerful is much harder than writing a full page. Trying to distill a longer work into a short evocative phrase is a good exercise in creativity and communication.
@martin As someone who does in fact bake bread and make clothing, I agree. :)
@martin The #AI models themselves require this centralized collection of massive amounts of data to train, and the models are notoriously not inspectable by nature. I love the idea of #opensource #distributedcomputing that we all build and own together. I’m not sure the technology itself is compatible with this vision at present. (Also, the vast majority of humans with network connection don’t have devices nearly powerful enough to run local AI.)