| ▲ | jauntywundrkind a day ago | |
There's some nuance in difference, but strong parallels to (the amazing) Ursala Franklin, who had two dichotomies: Work vs control technologies: tech like a typewriter we use to write or a chisel to carve, versus tech that orchestrates and narrows human behavior. Prescriptive vs holistic technologies: tech that expects the worker to confirm to the specific intended use, versus tech that expands the workers agency & possibility, enables them to do new things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_... Lovely post from Cory. I particularly liked the part about > But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive process). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, "an accountability sink" (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a "moral crumple zone"). Corporations are new immortal giants striding the lands, and how their vast godlike powers are used is an absolutely earth-quaking terror, often. The diffusion of responsibility they enable, and the seeming inability or unwillingness of both the law & society to assess, to reward & penalize these giants is a great imo tragedy. We barely see, with our ant-sized view of the world. | ||