Weekend Reader 01/29/23
Latest thinky links: Context Collapse #193
Some reading for your weekend:
Big Tech was moving cautiously on AI. Then came ChatGPT. (Nitasha Tiku, Gerrit de Vynck & Will Oremus / WaPo)
ChatGPT, on the other hand, will converse about the concept of falsehoods in the Quran, write a prayer for a rabbi to deliver to Congress and compare God to a flyswatter. […] Tech giants have been skittish since public debacles like Microsoft’s Tay, which it took down in less than a day in 2016 after trolls prompted the bot to call for a race war, suggest Hitler was right and tweet “Jews did 9/11.” Meta defended Blenderbot and left it up after it made racist comments in August, but pulled down an AI tool called Galactica in November after just three days amid criticism over its inaccurate and sometimes biased summaries of scientific research.
NYC subway payment systems: Who gets left out by changing technology? (Andrew Egan / Tedium)
The results of the report are quite staggering, confirming something that many New Yorkers have long suspected to be true: the system sucks. Of the 2.4 billion swipes logged in the 22 month period covered, 688 million swipes failed. This is a nearly 29 percent failure rate. Almost one in four times a New Yorker attempted to access the subway, they failed to do so. The report notes that “it’s reasonable to assume some are the result of consumer error—riders who incorrectly or fraudulently swipe—it’s also reasonable to assume that consumer error alone cannot account for the high frequency of swipe failure.” Things like this tend to affect lower income communities more, so it’s unsurprising the report found that failure rates were higher in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The rules according to Pamela Paul (Molly Fischer / New Yorker)
Paul has produced a body of work—deliberately contrarian or not—that reliably results in buttons being pushed. Her inaugural column, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience,’ ” took up the question of who has “the right” to address culturally specific subject matter. For example: “Am I, as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?” Paul wrote. “Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture—docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.”
A Google software engineer says it was a 'slap in the face' to find out he was laid off via email after 20 years at the company (Grace Dean / Insider)
Dan Russell, a research scientist, said on LinkedIn: "I found out when I went to work at 4AM to finish up an important analysis, and my badge didn't work. After 17.5 years at Google, it was kind of a tough way to discover that I'd become a Xoogler." Elizabeth Hart, a senior marketing manager on Google's global ads team who had worked at the company since 2007, said on LinkedIn that she found out she had been laid off when she checked her phone on Friday morning, while "bleary eyed and still half asleep," and saw a notification saying that her corporate access had expired, alongside one for a New York Times article about the layoffs.