It’s still rapacious capitalism

From Cory Doctorow:

The fact that AI can’t do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can’t do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market.

I’m not sure that it’s the central fact of contemporary labor, what with the resurgence of fascism, the retheming of jobs as gigs, and the casual evasion of hard-fought safeguards. But, as I’ve noted before, it is a thing.

Grad conference on Pop Culture and Philosophy

The theme for this year’s UAlbany grad student conference is Pop Culture and Philosophy. The keynote speaker will be William Irwin, who as a volume and series editor basically invented the genre.

If you have something that might fit the bill, I recommend submitting. It’s a fun conference, and I look forward to it every year.

Details are at PhilEvents.

Qualifying the praise of outsiders

At Daily Nous, Justin writes in praise of the outsider perspective. He quotes William Lycan:

An outsider to a small subliterature is more likely than is an insider to make an interesting or even important contribution to it. And the same for an outsider to a whole problematic within an area of philosophy. And possibly the same for an outsider to a whole area.

This resonates with me. As a philosopher of science, I ended up with a research program in the philosophy of music because my perspective on problems cast an interested light on questions beyond science. That said, here are some cautionary remarks about the outsider perspective— running roughly in order from the least serious to the most fundamental.

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Labour-squandering technology

Australian regulators sponsored a test using generative AI to summarize documents. The soft-spoken conclusion was that “AI outputs could potentially create more work… due to the need to fact check outputs, or because the original source material actually presented information better.”

Coverage of the study leads with the headline: AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information

The strangeness of the living present

Via the Otus Shrine, I came across this new illustration by Erol Otus which depicts the guitarist Tom Morello jamming out with monsters not of this Earth. It was commissioned by Morello’s friend Dan B. Weiss as a gift for Morello’s 60th-birthday. Appropriately, it distorts my sense of time in a way that feels impossible.

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AV Undercover lives!

On YouTube, I stumbled across “We’re just GWAR” a campy parody of “I’m just Ken.” The video mentions, just at the beginning, that it’s the return of A.V. Undercover.

The show was on what I can now call a 7 year hiatus, but which looked during that interval like an ignominious demise. A handful of the videos were posted to YouTube by other people, but most of them were gone.

As part of the reboot, they’ve reposted the archives. So the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s awesome cover of “Debra”, which seemed like it was lost to time, is also back.

Goodbye, Robert

Today I attended the memorial service for my late colleague Robert Meyers, who passed away last week.

His philosophical writing addressed epistemology and pragmatism, among other things. His work on Peirce and James contains insights that informed my own work.

When I interviewed for the job here at Albany, I had breakfast with another of the faculty on the morning before my flight back to Maine. Robert met us in the parking lot to give me copies of several papers that we’d discussed, and he said he hoped to be seeing me in the Fall.3 I had to wait for the department’s decision to make me an offer, of course, but it was a welcome positive sign.

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Parrot progress

Emily Bender famously coined the phrase stochastic parrot to describe text-only chatbots. The trend towards parrots continutes: Ars Technica has a clip of a ChatGPT-4o test run where the bot, which has a canned voice it is supposed to use, replies in the user’s own voice.

OpenAI promises that the actual release version totally doesn’t do this.4

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