NOTES FROM THE GOOD ROBOT PODCAST:

Automaton sci fi novel

Uncanny sci fi journal

Sammy basu

Ezme dimmia machine hoot

P j Lee Clarke a dead jin in Cairo, a Master of jin, clockwork beings, automata

Transparency in technology- gives users agency - shows the mechanisms - choices - citation as transparency?? - accountability

Ruha Benjamin White race after Jim crow

Google search is catered to the searcher, not neutral

Algorithm literacy -education- teaching a language - being a mindful user of technology - data ephemerality -

Artifacts have politics Langdon winners

The radical ai podcast

Digital democracies institution  Wendy chun

Homophaly - 3 closest friends questions ("evidence" on types of friendships, analysing the axioms embedded in technology)  - affinities - Paul gilroy - distributed intimacies- similarity breeds connection  - came from studies of biracial housing projects -  automating problematic dynamics - Connected through ambivalence- network as the white space - friendship becoming bidirectional through social media algorithms- friendship has become far more loose through social media -

Eugenicist??

Ronald fischl discriminatory analysis feature selction vectors

Fluidity, neural nets, so many layers, hacks to pull it apart and understand what is going on, logistic regression turns into a definitive a and b, a binary logic , bias variants trade off, institutional statistical models and machine learning, validated in different ways with errors against the past , the perception of prediction associated with machine learning, used for forecasting, performative- machine performativity,  usually when machine learning models are described as predictive they have correctly predicted past data sets not future ones, that is how these models are validated, perpetuation of racist, sexist classiest predictions, in these models truth equals repetition,  can be used as warnings and probes rather than truth

The point of global climate change models is for them not to be validated , if they can be then they have failed,

Beth Coleman speculative ai, indigenous ai

Machine unlearning with Kate crawford
Ariella azulai,  past not as past but as world's that are still with us, not primary sources but potential companions, (citation as comapnion), Karen killings listening to the world's that are still with us,

Not counter history but potential history, find the traces of voices, history as relived reanimated everytime we use these concepts , ways to reflect

Montreal massacre - men and women separated -

Training models without surveillance and mass data collection, federi of learning, blaise aguera, 

10000 things art in Asia, artefacts of an entire culture, can't be attributed in any way to a specific artist creator, 

Don't want to cover up my tracks and be singular project singularity , intelligence operates across the entire network,   is a company acting intelligently - togetherness - collective

Marginalised groups know about collectivism against western individualism

Clothes have become our body hair, technology can be thought of as an inorganic growth of our bodies intelligence, same way a snails shell is a technology, humanity and technology are bound up in the same way

The idea of Optimisation - big issue, life being optimised for survival - winning at nature in a video game, but that perspective of nature is wrong -  but what persists exists,  what has hung around is what we have got,

Deep minds

But optimisation doesn't take into account the fact it is all about interactions all the players are having experiences on every and across every level ,  maybe there isn't an actual difference between cooperative and competitive games (or in life) it is just a matter of perspective,

How does "motherhood" and the violence around not being able to continue the human race cause of sexuality, disability etc play into or relate to ai optimisation??

Mothers and others -sarah blather Herdy , aloparent,  need babysitters, collaborative nature in child rearing - why we are invested in each other,   naked mole rats --one is biological mother to many and others do the social rearing

High reproductive rate correlated with low gdp-

Minority communities have always gravitated towards cities  - density is higher
Why kinsey wrote about Gay culture as being fundamentally urban - function of all the interactions that take place because the density is higher

That sorting has has been fuel for political polarising- homogeneous countryside, heterogenous cities,

Jack halberstam - automating gender - 

Christina grammaticupolou theorises the glitch as the wilderness jn the machine, failure is at the heart of humanness, resist predictability, digital wildness of the glitch

The glitch represents a kind of time space function, can't account for the time and space, an imaginative capacity, with everything in capitalism the glitch can easily be incorporated back into various profit regimes, the glitch can humanise the machine that was once thought of a perfect, the breakdown and the failure of that system brings us back to the same level as peole to the machine, perpetuating a kind of battle and war and western power minded individualism, we embrace the glitch because we love to see thibgs fail as we do to feel better about ourselves and also to , another capitalist mechanism and makes the tech seem user friendly buttt the power of the glitch is it's unpredictability,   

Metropolis,
Kathryn Hales
Jane Bennett the agency of non human entities

Buddhism and ai
Metrics can do violence to the spiritual landscape, data gathering is useful and iterate what we are trying to work on, there needs to be a balance of qualitative (story telling, nuance, person based, subjective experience) and quantitative (data collection, value science, statistics)analysis. Civic trust, happiness, community, don"t have good methods to quantitative analysis of these things. No metrics for it so could dismiss it as an area to study and analyse.

Optimising to promote more trust, empathy, kindness, community, what would these algorithms look like? Should we create new sets of data to train our ai (utopian, moral directions? Make it ethical through control) the ai can give a scape goat to not giving access to some. But a racist, ableist, classiest, sexist cisist system has usually trained these algorithms. Creating major challenge to civic society.

Wisdom and intelligence difference - what is the relationship between tech and wisdom and how can we develop that. Tenzin priyadashi- gives an example of a tomatoe is labelled as a fruit but you wouldn't put it in your fruit salad - difference between intelligence and wisdom, you can understand from data that it is a fruit but wisdom is something gained maybe quite intuitively and actualisation, through trial and error,  intelligence in its most Conservative form does not account for other kinds of things that humans use to make decisions, also with regards to making ethical decisions , hard to replicate or teach that especially in a machine learning platform.

Human decision making is never binary, always complex and uses personal wisdom. How can Buddhism help to build better ai ecosystems. Any ecosystem is only as good as their ability to self-correct and grow,  otherwise it becomes a stagnant system.  Ask the question of mutual growth, meaning, purpose, does the ai help us become more self-aware and reflective at least, harder to work out if the ai would self-reflect in an ethical way,

Reflective algorithms, certain feedback loops we can establish (cybernetics) , idea ai will give us free time and us humans will only do good things with this free time, which is a weird assumption

Embedding cultural representation into an ai is possible but very difficult. It would need a whole lot of context to help the machine know when how why what to act when how where etc and would also need to be fed ethics in a non binary rule based structure but with the adaptability and wisdom of a person. Also humans are  not good at making decisions themselves in context.  Should not take a reductionist approach into embedding culture into the machine

Larrisa lai on writing historical fiction-

The lost century  is a novel that tells the stories of ordinary Hong-Kong people living through Japanese occupation during ww2. She is more interested in the locals, fishermen etc and the descendants of those that were there before the British came.  Showing Hong Kong in 1930s and 1940s as a nascently cosmopolitan place. Many kinds of lives.


Cynthia Bennett
Mara Mills
Ideo - design saviour narrative rather than emphasising the people it was enabling access and the structural Oppression around them - 

VIRUS LIST:

·      Artifacts have politics, Langdon Winner

·      Automaton, Larissa Lai

·      Benjamin, Ruha, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.

·      Bio-orientialism and the Yellow Peril of Yellow Life, Quinn Lester

·      Body Work, Melissa Febos

·      Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, "Race and/as Technology, or How to do Things to Race." Race 

·      Day, Iyko, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism. 

·      Don’t call us dead, Danez Smith

·      Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls, Kai Cheng Thom

·      FutureCrafting: A Speculative Method for an Imaginative AI - 0rphan Drift Archive (orphandriftarchive.com)

·      Halberstam, Jack, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Duke University Press.

·      Hayot, Eric, ”Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures."

·      Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement Beyond the Human.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

·      Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. 

·      Legacy Russel in Glitch Feminism

·      Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.

·      Ma, Ling., Severance: A Novel

·      Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.

·      Refusing compulsory sexuality: A Black asexual lens on our sex-obsessed culture Sherronda J. Brown

·      Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media.

·      Soft Science, Franny Choi 

·      Vinciane Despret, Secret Agents

·       Chen, Mel., Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. 

·       Huang, Michelle N. “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch." 

·       Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Karen Embry, ”A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism."

·       Skin Folk | Hopkinson Nalo

·       The Virosexuals, Orion J. Facey

·      “The wilderness in the machine”: Glitch and the poetics of error, Christina Grammatikopoulou

·      Zombuddha, Bryan Thao Worra