| 1. A brilliant attempt to understand the Amazon Echo by making "an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources." "A brief command and a response is the most common form of engagement with this consumer voice-enabled AI device. But in this fleeting moment of interaction, a vast matrix of capacities is invoked: interlaced chains of resource extraction, human labor and algorithmic processing across networks of mining, logistics, distribution, prediction and optimization. The scale of this system is almost beyond human imagining. How can we begin to see it, to grasp its immensity and complexity as a connected form? We start with an outline: an exploded view of a planetary system across three stages of birth, life and death, accompanied by an essay in 21 parts. Together, this becomes an anatomical map of a single AI system." + Robin Sloan sent me this with the note, "Extremely 5IT." He's extremely right. If you see links like this, hit reply on any of my emails and send away. 2. It's not often you find a deep, perfectly executed answer to a common question—are pop lyrics getting more repetitive?—that also includes a good detour into a compression algorithm. "You may not have heard of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, but you probably use it every day. It's a lossless compression algorithm that powers gifs, pngs, and most archive formats (zip, gzip, rar...). What does this have to do with pop music? The Lempel-Ziv algorithm works by exploiting repeated sequences. How efficiently LZ can compress a text is directly related to the number and length of the repeated sections in that text." 3. What's it like to be a Bird scooter mechanic? "I made my splash into the “side-gig” industry as a Bird Charger this past Spring. I figured at $5 each, it would be a great way to earn some extra beer money. After about a week, Bird had reached out to see if I’d like to become a mechanic. I’m a fairly handy guy, so I thought, “why not?”… I was frustrated with the hoarders and was never able to grab more than a few $5 scooters a night, so doing some repairs at $20 per scooter seemed great (They’ve since lowered that rate to $15)." 4. If you want to understand the way the far-right fever swamps have come to influence mainstream politics, it's worth taking a look at what happened in mid-century Orange County. "Indeed, Kielsmeier and 'suburban warriors' like her built a vibrant and remarkable political mobilization during the 1960s, and it is their history that this book seeks to chronicle. It was in suburbs such as Garden Grove, Orange County (the place Kielsmeier called home), in conjunction with the backing of regional entrepreneurs, that small groups of middle-class men and women met in their new tract homes, seeking to turn the tide of liberal dominance. Recruiting the like-minded, they organized study groups, opened 'Freedom Forum' bookstores, filled the rolls of the John Birch Society, entered school board races, and worked within the Republican Party, all in an urgent struggle to safeguard their particular vision of freedom and the American heritage. In doing so, they became the ground forces of a conservative revival—one that transformed conservatism from a marginal force preoccupied with communism in the early 1960s into a viable electoral contender by the decade’s end." 5. Any kind of risk assessment in the prison system should have to be fully transparent. "Algorithmic risk assessments often place heavy weights on age in a manner that is not fully transparent – or, in the case of proprietary 'black-box' algorithms, not transparent at all. For instance, our analysis of one of the leading black-box tools, the COMPAS Violent Recidivism Risk Score, shows that roughly 60% of the risk score it produces is attributable to age. We argue that this type of fact must be disclosed to sentencing authorities in an easily-interpretable manner so that they understand the role an offender’s age plays in the risk calculation. Failing to reveal that a stigmatic label such as 'high risk of violent crime' is due primarily to a defendant’s young age could lead to improper condemnation of a youthful offender, especially given the close association between risk labels and perceptions of character and moral blameworthiness." ALSO: I got to ride around in Waymo's autonomous taxi service last week. It was a strange experience, especially once I started to watch the wheel turning itself. "In fact, the illusion of similarity between human and computer drivers is probably the most potent thing in Waymo’s push for technological acceptance. If enough people can simply imagine that there is nothing all that different about self-driving cars, then Waymo can slip in to society. And once the robots are doing the driving without human minders, they can optimize in the way Silicon Valley does, grinding down the price through operational efficiency and increasing the availability of transportation that robots can deliver. This is the ghost of car-human past and capitalism future, available now in a desert boomtown and coming soon to a low-density suburb near you." [an anatomical map of a single AI system] | 