#MIT
Carbon Capture is a necessary component to reducing emissions, but, by the end of 2023 ...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/04/1084381/fossil-fuel-emissions-carbon-removal-efforts/
#StitchedInkMedia #Politics #Carbon #carboncapture #Energy #Emissions #Million #Nature #Science #MIT #reality #UN #COP28 #Environment #Air #Health
Théorie du Chaos | Déclics | ARTE
La théorie du chaos naquit vers 1900, lorsque des mathématiciens comme Jacques Salomon Hadamard (1865-1963) et Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) étudièrent les trajectoires complexes des corps en mouvement.
Au début des années 1960, Edward Lorenz (1917-2008), chercheur météorologue au Massachusetts Institute of Technology, utilisa un système d'équations pour modéliser la convection dans l'atmosphère.
Idee: CO2 aus der Luft mit Solar/Windüberschuss in Ameisensäure umwandeln. Und damit Ameisensäure-Brennstoffzellen (*) betreiben.
Kein Science Fiction, sondern aktuell Stand der Forschung
(*) Nein, hab ich vorher auch noch nie gehört.
#erneuerbare #energiewende #mit #harvard
https://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2023/11/14/co2-treibstoff/
From Minion in Training to #ROH Women’s World Championship Challenger: #Athena vs #BillieStarkz
almost 3 Hours long
▶️ https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1730806763283214698
Friday, Dec 15
#ROHFinalBattle | Garland, TX | http://ROHTIX.com
LIVE Exclusively on #HonorClub
Subscribe now: http://WatchROH.com
#ROH #Wrestling #ProWrestling #WomensWrestling #WatchROH #HonorClub #MinionInTraining #MIT #ROHFinalBattle #FinalBattle
Wasserrohrbruch im Tierheim Süderstraße in Hamburg
Das Tierheim Süderstraße kämpft weiterhin mit seiner völlig maroden Anlage. Am Freitag konnte der Schaden repariert werden.
#Das #Tierheim #Süderstraße #kämpft #weiterhin #mit #seiner #völlig #maroden #Anlage #HamburgNews #Hamburg
Wired: Dr. Nergis Mavalvala Detected the First Gravitational Wave. Her Work Doesn’t Stop There https://www.wired.com/story/women-in-science-nergis-mavalvala/ #Tech #wired #TechNews #IT #Technology via @morganeogerbc #Science/PhysicsandMath #WomeninScience #Science/Space #astrophysics #WomeninSTEM #Science #physics #Gravity #space #MIT
Over at MIT: 〝[…] instead of directly optimizing over the reward function, we just use it to tell the robot which areas it should be exploring〞
https://news.mit.edu/2023/method-uses-crowdsourced-feedback-help-train-robots-1127
#BillieStarkz gets her MATCH vs #Athena for the ROH Womens Championship at #ROHFinalBattle on Friday, December, 15th exclusively on http://WatchROH.com
#ROH #Wrestling #ProWrestling #WomensWrestling #WatchROH #HonorClub #MinionInTraining #MIT #RingofHonor
The #ROH Women's World Champion #Athena has a special task for "Minion In Training" #BillieStarkz tonight.
#ROH #Wrestling #ProWrestling #WomensWrestling #WatchROH #HonorClub #MinionTraining #MIT #RingofHonor
#MIT just released a major 56 pp report on #OpenAccess & the future of academic #publishing. I esp like the fact that the last 12 pp are devoted to 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 "to spur research that will…inform future policies & their implementation."
* Splash page
https://access-to-science.pubpub.org/
* Report itself
https://assets.pubpub.org/5coqhl85/Access%20to%20science%20and%20scholarship%20MIT%20report%20Nov%202023-11699913821553.pdf
* Associated interview
https://news.mit.edu/2023/phillip-sharp-amy-brand-future-open-access-publishing-1130
(Unfortunately the report has no table of contents. MIT: Could you please add one retroactively to support both skimming & close reading?)
#college #mit #opencourseware #education
free to use, 'audit'
"
MIT OpenCourseWare is a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.
"
https://ocw.mit.edu/
#MIT #HOMELESS #SanDiego The County of San Diego has been chosen to team up with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) global research center, which will provide technical assistance on the evaluation of a County pilot program aiming to keep low-income seniors from becoming homeless.
https://www.countynewscenter.com/county-teams-up-with-mit-global-research-center/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=county-teams-up-with-mit-global-research-center
“Weizenbaum’s Nightmares: How The Inventor Of The First Chatbot Turned Against AI”, The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai).
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Eliza #MIT #Nazis #Germany #Poland #Psychology #Psychoanalysis
repository is here: https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer
#mit licensed and it has docker and k8s definitions
Los #Metamateriales, materiales que adquieren superpoderes, están siendo estudiados en el #MIT
#MIT Media Lab #SpaceExploration Initiative : "Our goal is to invent, create, and deploy ideas 💭 that seem exotic and #impossible today, but could be commonplace in ten years. We’ll #OpenSource our payload designs, #democratize the future of #SpaceExploration." https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/space-exploration/overview/
#Fediverse / #ActivityPub contribution suggestion:
#Grimoire bookmarking app.
The maintainer of Grimoire is aware of the fedi and sees merit in having an integration within the app.. https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire/issues/4
@keat
What makes something authority?
Human beings and institutions can't get rid of decision making.
The power of a country or nation lies in decision making.
Why #MIT is synonymous of Technology.
Knowing is prerequisite to decision making.
Ethics is the result of conflicts of knowing.
#Microsoft is very soft at micro level while making decision like religion is very soft at inner level.
How do we trust?
#Microsoft hat das #RTOS #ThreadX an die #Eclipse Foundation übergeben und es unter die #MIT Lizenz gestellt. Nicht schlecht. Das wäre ja fast an mir vorbei gegangen 🙂.
https://www.heise.de/news/Microsofts-Echtzeitbetriebssystem-wandert-als-Open-Source-zur-Eclipse-Foundation-9538518.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege
The #MIT Free Speech Alliance has made a statement on the recent #email issue.
https://garymcgath.com/wp/statement-by-mit-free-speech-alliance/
Symbolics trademarked "Your Next Step in Computing" in 1985, the same year Steve Jobs started NeXT: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73567294&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch
I find it funny for some reason.
#Symbolics #Lisp #LispMachine #LispM #MIT #NeXT #NeXTSTEP #Apple #SteveJobs #MacOSX #macOS #ComputerHistory #ComputingHistory #Retrocomputing
Confira o Olhar Digital News na íntegra
Confira! 👇
https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/11/21/videos/confira-o-olhar-digital-news-na-integra-152/
My blog post from earlier today had a serious error about exactly what might have been compromised in the malicious email sent to #MIT Free Speech Alliance subscribers. Please reread it if you read it earlier.
https://garymcgath.com/wp/mit-email-hijacked/
The #MIT Free Speech Alliance mailing list may have been hijacked. https://garymcgath.com/wp/mit-email-hijacked/
Les campus étatsuniens sont aussi touchés par des tensions liées à la guerre entre Israël et Gaza. Depuis le MIT, Esther Duflo souligne le paradoxe d'universités, qui prônent la liberté d'expression mais restreignent certaines manifestations de gauche : https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-biais-d-esther-duflo/la-guerre-israel-hamas-vue-des-campus-americains-le-paradoxe-de-la-liberte-d-expression-7836216
#financement #mécénat #université #universités #MIT #donateurs #donations #campus #Gaza #guerre #guerreIsraëlGaza #israëlPalestine #proSionisme
Nova cápsula ingerível monitora sinais vitais através do intestino
Tales from the jar side: My friend Albert Tam, MIT wants cash but I have better alternatives, OpenAI chaos, and the usual tweets, toots, and skeets, by @kenkousen
https://open.substack.com/pub/kenkousen/p/tales-from-the-jar-side-my-friend?r=2dwq5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
#java #ai #openai #mit
I met a friend who's #MIT faculty last night. The stuff that he told me about what's going on campus over there is truly scary. According to him "it's 1939 Germany". Jewish students (just Jewish, not Israeli, no relation to the situation in the middle east whatsoever) are being ignored and shunned by their fellow students. Study groups disbanded, their dorms are plastered with propaganda against them. When Jewish students walk down the halls of their dorms other students literally turn away on purpose in order to not have eye contact with them. And I'll spare you from what the Israeli foreign students are saying. So go on and tell me that "antizionism is not antisemitism" or whatever. This is EXACTLY what happened in Germany in the 1930s and it's repeating itself here, in the US, in ivy league schools. MIT administration is completely impotent, they don't want to take any action because a lot of the people who organize this shit are foreign students in a student visa and they don't want to expel them "because they will lose their visa to the US" (and MIT will lose the $$$). Absolutely disgusting.
Vitals now monitored
In your GI tract they reside
Medical breakthrough
#UneeBee Open source interactive learning
"UneeBee is an open-source, white-label alternative to #Duolingo. Easily create interactive courses to teach anything. It’s great for companies, schools, and creators."
A new #MIT-licensed #FOSS project by https://zoonk.org who have more projects in educational space, cc @CEDO
Who is going to create the issue in their tracker to add #ActivityPub support and come to the Fediverse? 🤔
The #ROH Women's World Champion #Athena gives a post-match performance review to "Minion In Training" #BillieStarkz
#ROH #Wrestling #ProWrestling #WomensWrestling #WatchROH #HonorClub #MinionTraining #MIT #RingofHonor
"That spring of 1959, a new course was offered at #MIT. It was the first course in #programming a computer that freshmen could take. The teacher was a distant man with a wild shock of hair and an equally unruly beard--John McCarthy. A master mathematician...a classically absent-minded professor; stories abounded about his habit of suddenly answering a question hours, sometimes even days after it was first posed to him."
-- Steven Levy, #Hackers (1994), pg. 24.
Preis für Friede Springer: Ehrung für Kampf gegen Antisemitismus – „Wir kriegen Lob für unsere Haltung und das ist wichtig“ - Video - WELT
4 Kritikpunkte zu SysML 2: Bitte mit Vorsicht genießen
Michael Pierce von TSP hat mit seinem Kollegen Bruce Cameron ein Essay verfasst, in dem er SysML kritisiert. Einerseits ist es lesenswert für Organisationen, die den strategischen Einsatz von SysML erwägen. Denn viele Punkte sind durchaus valide. Andererseits finde ich nicht alle Kritikpunkte als ger
https://www.se-trends.de/4-kritikpunkte-zu-sysml-2/
#ModellierungMBSE #Organisationen #HypeZyklus #MBSE #MIT #SpaceX #SysML #Werkzeuge
Lokführer-Streik: Jetzt will die Union das Streikrecht einschränken
SHUT IT DOWN FOR PALESTINE 🇵🇸
MIT, Brandeis, Harvard, and several other institutions have tried to repress their students’ support for Palestine with threats, arrests, and suspensions.
BUT THEY CAN’T SUSPEND THE MOVEMENT!!
Join us in demanding an immediate ceasefire, an end to the siege on Gaza, an end to the US-funded Israeli occupation, and a Free Palestine!
📍Boston Common
🗓️Friday, Nov. 17
⏰3pm
#ShutItDown4Palestine #boston #massachusetts #studentsforjusticeinpalestine #sjp #MIT #Harvard #brandeis
The #Shopware Demo Data Plugin is publicly available under #MIT license. Looking forward to your contributions! https://github.com/shopware/SwagPlatformDemoData
My Lock Screen this morning. I really love whatever technique Apple is using to select lock screens that just fit. Well done!
This is a building at #MIT, designed by Frank Gehry, in case you’re curious.
#Apple #iphone #photography #architecture
Panel discussion with Lee McIntyre and Adam Berinsky at the MIT Museum, with signed copies of their books sold after.
#misinformation #disinformation #MDM #MIT #museum #books #CambridgeMA #Boston
My photos from yesterday's Boston rally & march in solidarity with Palestine & its liberation.
https://www.litakelley.com/blog/boston-coalition-for-palestine-shuts-down-massachusetts-ave/
#boston #massachusetts #mit #freepalestine #photography #photographer #photojournalism #freepalestine #palestiniansolidarity #protest
Carbon Removal Technology: MIT Startup’s LEGO-Like Direct Air Capture System
https://scitechdaily.com/carbon-removal-technology-mit-startups-lego-like-direct-air-capture-system/
#tech #technology #carbondioxide #carboncapture #greentech #mit #greenhousegas #greenhousegasses #environment
We shut down Boston from Copley Sq, all the way up Newbury St, onto Massachusetts Ave, all the way to MIT in Cambridge.
We shut down the entire length of the Mass Ave bridge.
https://www.tiktok.com/@lita_kelley/video/7300743249591815470
A group of pro-Israel students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is criticizing the school's administrators, alleging they remained silent as a pro-Palestine demonstration held on campus Thursday blocked Jewish and Israeli students from attending class.
An open letter from the MIT Israel Alliance shared online alleges the students were obstructed from traveling to their classes as the student organization "Coalition Against Apartheid" organized a demonstration for several hours in MIT's Lobby 7 in Cambridge, Mass.
[Note: MIT policy prohibits political demonstrations in Lobby 7, the principal campus entrance]
Video of the protest posted on Instagram by the CAA shows how authorities blocked doors in the lobby, preventing people from entering and leaving.
The Israel Alliance said in its letter that although the protest violated school protocols, university administrators let the demonstration play on for hours without forcing the demonstrators to leave and then refrained from immediately suspending the alleged violators as they said they would.
"Instead of dispersing the mob or de-escalating the situation by rerouting all students from Lobby 7, Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter MIT’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety," reads a copy of the letter shared on X by MIT professor Retsef Levi.
"The onus to protect Jewish students should not be on the students themselves."
#mit #caa
https://themessenger.com/news/mit-pro-palestinian-protest-blocking-jewish-students
Smart Irrigation Technology Covers "More Crop Per Drop"
--
https://news.mit.edu/2023/gear-lab-creates-affordable-user-driven-smart-irrigation-controller-1025 <-- shared technical article
--
“Placing solutions in the cloud but learning with boots on the ground, GEAR Lab researchers build low-cost, solar-powered irrigation tools to make precision agriculture more accessible..."
#water #waterresources #hydrology #irrigation #smartirrigation #GEAR #MIT #agriculture #farming #global #watermanagement #watersecurity #solarpowered #precisionagriculture #subsistencefarmers #crops #foodproduction #waterscarcity #soilquality #smallholder #farms #farmers #waterstress #sustainableagriculture #dripirrigation #MoreCropPerDrop #appliedscience #appliedtechnology
Happening now at MIT. Anti-war protestors calling for a ceasefire and an end to preventable civilian loss of life are being physically attacked, harassed, and threaten by MIT administration with suspension. #MIT #protest
https://twitter.com/still_francesca/status/1722823330804162934
It’s nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces.
The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman ’39, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two.
https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813
Although #Mozilla removed it from their add-on store, there's also a #Firefox extension with a similar functionality.
This makes it somewhat harder to install, but you don't need a server. Source code is hosted on #Gitlab and #MIT-licensed:
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
If you already host or are considering designing your own summer #stem institute, take a look at what MIT and their Lincoln Laboratory (part of their School of Engineering) does with the “Beaver Works Summer Institute”
https://beaverworks.ll.mit.edu/CMS/bw/bwsi
Now do Victoria's Secret and open up Jeffrey Epstein's files to see how many of those girls ended up in his New Mexico rape farm —aided and abetted by the #MIT scientists he bought himself with LEX WEXNER's Victoria's Secret money?
how many women ended up pregnant? who where the obstetricians inseminating with Epstein's sperm without consent?
Mike Jeffries link to Jeffrey Epstein is Lex Wexner.
"Lawsuit accuses Abercrombie & Fitch of funding sex-trafficking operation
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67238812
MII is a Free open source modern #Apple IIe emulator written in C, for #Linux, licensed under #MIT license.
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against #generativeAI | #MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/
Scanning some TX-2 docs for the museum. TX-2 assembler is WEIRD looking. #RetroComputing #MIT #RCSRI
The unbelievable self-absorption of #MIT never fails to make me laugh #AcademicChatter #AcademicReferences
Battle of the heavyweights: #Eversource, #MIT fight over paths of proposed new underground conduits #CambridgeMA https://www.cambridgeday.com/2023/10/16/mit-files-late-objection-to-plan-by-eversource-seeking-to-reroute-cables-for-new-substation
Excited to share this new podcast episode! I enjoyed speaking with Dr. Laura Kiessling about her work studying carbohydrates on the surface of cells, how she became a successful scientist, life outside the lab, advice, and more! https://www.peoplebehindthescience.com/dr-laura-kiessling/
Thank you to New England Biolabs for supporting this episode!
#womeninSTEM #WomenInScience #chemistry #science #research #scicomm #podcast #podcasts #ScienceCareers #phd #postdoc #MIT
(Thread) Went to the last MIT Swapfest of the year and walked it back and forth a couple times. Some photos of the more interesting stuff I saw. Also missed out on a HTX-100 10 meter rig which is the main thing I wanted this year but was too wishy washy to grab a really nice one for a good price. Blah! #mit #swapfest #hamfest
Tomorrow (Sunday) is the last MIT Swapfest of the year. Anyone want to meet up and walk the stalls?
The Swapfest is held at MIT’s Albany Street Garage on Albany St between Main Streets and Mass Ave in Cambridge. The gate opens for buyers at 9am. There is an admission fee of $6. You get a dollar off if you print and bring the poster from the web site.
http://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/. #cambridgema #mit #hamfest #swapfest #maker
One for the local #mit crowd.
Please share as widely as appropriate, we are looking for undergraduate and graduate students to work with the new Office of Research Computing and Data.
A great opportunity to work closely with our fabulous professional team here @ ORCD! Simultaneously learning all about large-scale, modern #hpc, while also helping to support our campus and community!
https://orcd.mit.edu/news/undergraduate-and-graduate-student-positions
🌞 Hello #fediverse! This is GBH #News bringing you the world from #Boston. It's 74F at Logan Airport and visibility is 10 miles.
Republican Kevin McCarthy is no longer Speaker of the House -- and at the moment, the House does not have a Speaker.
A suspect charged in the death of Tupac Shakur made his first court appearance in Las Vegas today.
#MIT's Moungi Bawendi has been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discoveries used in LED screens. #science
"Other social networks like MySpace and Vine had their moments, only to eventually fade into obscurity.
There are three possible reasons network effects can backfire, according to research from #CatherineTucker, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management."
#BobbyAllyn, 2023
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1168232177/twitter-tik-tok-replaced-network
Sometimes college is rad.
https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-certificate/
That of whom which we speak - an emerging phrase for younger #English speakers
#MIT #linguistics https://news.mit.edu/2023/whom-which-trend-linguistics-0927
Next Friday night (Sept 29): Improbable Dramatic Readings at the Cambridge Science Festival, at #MIT https://improbable.com/2023/09/05/coming-improbable-dramatic-readings-at-the-cambridge-science-festival/
🎉 New Changelog interview!
This week @adam & @jerod are joined by @sogrady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at Red Monk 🙌
Steve believes open source is at a crossroads and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal 😳
#opensource #foss #oss #licensing #gpl #copyleft #mit #freedom
Spent the evening showing off IF at the MIT Museum’s “After Dark” event. Thanks for inviting us!
And now, here’s a bunch of people chatting, including Dave Lebling and Mike Dornbrook.
International nerd fight at #TheaterDistrict club over the World Cup last December
#Boston #crime #WorldCup #MIT #SloanSchool https://www.universalhub.com/crime/20230912/international-nerd-fight-theater-district-club
🚢 New Changelog interview!
This week we’re talking about the launch of #OpenTF and what it’s going to take to successfully fork HashiCorp’s #Terraform 🍴
We’re joined by Josh Padnick to discuss what exactly happened, how #HashiCorp’s license change changes things, who has been impacted by this change, and ultimately what they are doing about it 💪
❓ How do we determine who owns information in the age of AI & book bans?
Sept 6, 2 - 3 PM MDT!
You are invited to join author Peter B. Kaufman of
MIT Open Learning as he talks with Stanford Ed professor emeritus / PKP Co-Scientific Director John Willinsky about "The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge"
Registration: https://ai4pg.gatherlearning.com/events/the-new-enlightenment-and-the-fight-to-free-knowledge
Are you a nerd in #Boston or #Cambridge and want to socialize?
We have been running a get together at #GrendelsDen in @HarvardSquare for many years and would like to invite folks to come and hang out.
The time is now 6pm, each Sunday. DM or email and come and enjoy a break from your computer for a little while with us. 🎉🫖🍻
#events #localevents #foss #linux #mit
Just went to the #MIT Museum today, this exhibut was stunning.
#boston peeps catch it while it's there :) It's worth the visit. I could stare at these moving mechanical art pieces for hours.
https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/exhibitions/in-concert-ganson-cavatorta
This US east coast time zone LECTURE SERIES LOOK LIKE SUCH GOOD FUN! "In this lunch lecture series, we are delighted to host six designers/studios whose work explore the intersection of typography, language and computation and whose work speaks to what design may look like in the future. " https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/lunch-lectures-computational-typography/
#Typography
#MIT
This is a great addendum in the Science magazine for replacing the Turing test for AI models with a "Weizenbaum test":
"Rather than a test of intelligence [like Turing test], a Weizenbaum test would assess the public value of AI technologies, evaluating them according to their real-world implications rather than their proponents’ claims."
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adk0176
Weizenbaum's questions to make such an assessment in the Bulletin of Atomic scientists seems to be apt not just for AI, but all of technology.
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
#15yrsago #DMCA does not apply to US government, which can crack #DRM with impunity https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/08/air-force-cracks-software-carpet-bombs-dmca/
#10yrsago Attacking the popular #Kwikset lock: open in 15 seconds with a screwdriver and a paper clip https://www.wired.com/2013/08/kwikset-smarkey-lock-vulns/
#10yrsago Six blatant lies about spying from the #NSA up to Obama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eptZuXkUGmI
#10yrsago Prosecutor #StephenHeymann told #MIT that #AaronSwartz was like a rapist who blames his victim https://web.archive.org/web/20130804190514/http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/01/prosecutor-stephen-heymann-compared-aaron-swartz-to-rapist/
5/
#10yrsago #NSA’s new meanings for common terms https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/07/nsa-lexicon-how-james-clapper-and-other-u-s-officials-mislead-the-american-public-without-lying.html
#10yrsago EFF: #MIT was not “neutral” on #AaronSwartz; actively assisted in his prosecution https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case-not-neutral-not-leading-not-standing-technologists
#10yrsago Molly Crabapple goes to #GuantanamoBay https://www.vice.com/en/article/av4wpk/it-dont-gitmo-better-than-this-0001000-v20n8
#10yrsago Prominent politicians and negotiators in poor countries speak out against #TPP https://www.techdirt.com/2013/07/30/discontent-with-secrecy-one-sided-nature-tpp-spreads-among-participating-nations/
7/
Coda:
Reading these excerpts on Weizenbaum's "no human being could ever fully understand another human being", I am reminded of a paragraph from the great anthropologist David Graeber's less read work, "Lost People" that states this quite stunningly:
"If it is really true... that what makes us human is above all our capacity to make history, and if history consists of actions that could not have been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human would then be to recognize the limits of one's possible knowledge of them. Their humanity is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us."
For too long, in the name of science and technology, for mostly nefarious and monetary purposes, the naysayers have insisted on making machines out of humans, and rendered them soulless and disenchanted. It's time to put the soul of value back into humans.
8/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
He seems to have been on the mark with respect to climate change:
"The later Weizenbaum was increasingly pessimistic about the future, much more so than he had been in the 1970s. Climate change terrified him. Still, he held out hope for the possibility of radical change. As he put it in a January 2008 article for Süddeutsche Zeitung: “The belief that science and technology will save the Earth from the effects of climate breakdown is misleading. Nothing will save our children and grandchildren from an Earthly hell. Unless: we organise resistance against the greed of global capitalism.”"
7/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
Human agency, the ability to make history, and usher progress:
"Just as the bomber pilot “is not responsible for burned children because he never sees their village”, Weizenbaum wrote, software afforded generals and executives a comparable degree of psychological distance from the suffering they caused."
"... Bound by an algorithmic logic, software lacked the flexibility and the freedom of human judgment. This helps explain the conservative impulse at the heart of computation. Historically, the computer arrived “just in time”, Weizenbaum wrote. But in time for what? “In time to save – and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilise – social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.” "
This is an absolutely wonderful synthesis of status quo, the relegation of agency and willful denial of responsibility by replacing humans with technologies and that has only intensified.
As the author notes later:
"Weizenbaum was always less concerned by AI as a technology than by AI as an ideology – that is, in the belief that a computer can and should be made to do everything that a human being can do. This ideology is alive and well. It may even be stronger than it was in Weizenbaum’s day."
What is this "ideology"? It goes something like what the political philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote: “they know it, but they are doing it anyway”, which he riffs from Marx who wrote of the capitalists, "they do not know it, but they are doing it". Marx himself was riffing on Jesus (from Luke):"Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they're doing".
6/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
Values, decisions, judgements: are they fit for optimization?
"For Weizenbaum, judgment involves choices that are guided by values. These values are acquired through the course of our life experience and are necessarily qualitative: they cannot be captured in code. Calculation, by contrast, is quantitative. It uses a technical calculus to arrive at a decision. Computers are only capable of calculation, not judgment. This is because they are not human, which is to say, they do not have a human history – they were not born to mothers, they did not have a childhood, they do not inhabit human bodies or possess a human psyche with a human unconscious – and so do not have the basis from which to form values."
"(It would be a “monstrous obscenity”, Weizenbaum wrote, to let a computer perform the functions of a judge in a legal setting or a psychiatrist in a clinical one.)"
This is as succinct an argument to make for why we should not be making value judgements that humans are "meat machines" or "biological automata" or just a "bag of neurons" with a body attached, or the urge to suggest that we are neither special or unique since every trait that a human possesses is now replicable by a machine. The one word is VALUE and that's quite a loaded word!
5/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
What differentiates humans from machines, the question at the heart of "human intelligence" and Weizenbaum's:
"In 1976, Weizenbaum published his magnum opus: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation... The book is indeed overwhelming. It is a chaotic barrage of often brilliant thoughts about computers. A glimpse at the index reveals the range of Weizenbaum’s interlocutors: not only colleagues like Minsky and McCarthy but the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the critical theorist Max Horkheimer, and the experimental playwright Eugène Ionesco."
"The book has two major arguments. First: there is a difference between man and machine. Second: there are certain tasks which computers ought not be made to do, independent of whether computers can be made to do them. The book’s subtitle – From Judgment to Calculation – offers a clue as to how these two statements fit together."
4/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
Weizenbaum and what he saw as necessary political action:
"Weizenbaum supported the action [MIT students protests of 1969] and became strongly affected by the political dynamism of the time. “It wasn’t until the merger of the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and MIT’s role in weapons development that I became critical,” he later explained in an interview. “And once I started thinking along those lines, I couldn’t stop.”
"... MIT was receiving more money from the Pentagon than any other university in the country. Its labs pursued a number of projects designed for Vietnam... Project MAC – under whose auspices Weizenbaum had created Eliza – had been funded since its inception by the Pentagon... wrestled with this complicity, he found that his colleagues, for the most part, didn’t care about the purposes to which their research might be put. If we don’t do it, they told him, somebody else will. Or: scientists don’t make policy, leave that to the politicians. Weizenbaum was again reminded of the scientists in Nazi Germany who insisted that their work had nothing to do with politics... Consumed by a sense of responsibility, Weizenbaum dedicated himself to the anti-war movement... Where possible, he used his status at MIT to undermine the university’s opposition to student activism. After students occupied the president’s office in 1970, Weizenbaum served on the disciplinary committee. According to his daughter Miriam, he insisted on a strict adherence to due process, thereby dragging out the proceedings as long as possible so that students could graduate with their degrees."
3/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
Weizenbaum vs what he termed the "Artificial Intellgentsia":
"Minsky was bullish and provocative; one of his favourite gambits was to declare the human brain nothing but a “meat machine” whose functions could be reproduced, or even surpassed, by human-made machines. Weizenbaum disliked him from the start... Weizenbaum’s trouble with Minsky, and with the AI community as a whole, came down to a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the human condition."
"... he [Weizenbaum] argued that no computer could ever fully understand a human being. Then he went one step further: no human being could ever fully understand another human being. Everyone is formed by a unique collection of life experiences that we carry around with us, he argued, and this inheritance places limits on our ability to comprehend one another. We can use language to communicate, but the same words conjure different associations for different people – and some things can’t be communicated at all. “There is an ultimate privacy about each of us that absolutely precludes full communication of any of our ideas to the universe outside ourselves,” Weizenbaum wrote."
2/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
A must read longform on the pioneer of AI chatbot who became AI's main and earliest detractors, Joseph Weizenbaum (of ELIZA fame here at MIT) by Ben Tarnoff!
Weizenbaum's was a lone voice in the 1970s, and many of his views are as apt now as they were then. Almost the entire article is chock full of quotes, and so here is a thread with quotes and a few of my thoughts interspersed.
"There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution."
I too had my early training in computer science, and have come to see it increasingly as counter-revolutionary not even delivering on its promises of economic productivity (topic for another day). With my expertise in neural networks, I should be riding atop the current wave of AI to the bank, instead, I mostly see it as a land of false promises mediated by dangerous levels of silicon valley mythmaking.
1/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
Moving days for MIT’s history
The #MIT #Museum is preparing to transfer its enormous collection — and making a few surprising discoveries along the way.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/moving-days-mit-history-museum-collections-0721