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A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
Consider the [much-criticised ad for Apple’s latest tablet](https://www.ft.com/content/1f7314d7-577c-4263-a69f-b11757d85b4d). In “Crush!” a colossal hydraulic press steadily obliterates a mountain of musical instruments, books, cameras and art supplies, to the strains of Sonny and Cher’s 1971 hit “All I Ever Need Is You”, leaving behind only an ultra-thin iPad. This one device, we are meant to understand, has within it all the capabilities of the demolished objects. We won’t be needing them any more.
The AI We Could Have Had
Evgeny Morozov
Generative models instead negate all those conceptions. They depend on the premises that there are no “new and original meanings;” that all meaning is already determined and does in fact stem from existing rules, rules that are not intractable but can be systematically extracted from data; that everything can be exchanged into everything else at a higher level of abstraction; that no moment is irreducible or “nonidentical,” to use one of Adorno’s terms.
Epic Forgetting
Rob Horning
Automation ultimately isn’t steered by the aim of making things work better or easier for the people they are imposed on; it is meant to divert resources according to the operative distributions of power. It certainly doesn’t redistribute power downward. Rather it systematically puts people in their place. The equilibrium that automated systems settle into isn’t about efficiency so much as ideology: the optimal level of frustration that people can be made to bear without sparking any meaningful resistance. They train us in accepting ambient contempt with a sense of apathy.
Two Riders Were Approaching
Rob Horning
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