This week…
I’m moving. So if this issue seems poorly curated, that’s why. Anyway, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
‘I do surfing’: an AI-generated Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s bad year
Julia Carrie Wong and Botnik Studios for The Guardian:
The Guardian would have loved to ask Zuckerberg some follow-up questions about that, but since metaZuck isn’t doing much in the way of sitting for interviews with critical journalists these days, we fell back upon a last resort: we built another Zuckerbot and interviewed it instead.
To do this, we worked with Botnik Studios to create a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg’s public statements (archived by Marquette University’s Zuckerberg Files). Our previous interview with the Zuckerbot, conducted in 2019 and based on Zuck’s statements from 2016 to 2019, can be found here. Guardian journalists provided the questions; Botnik used the predictive keyboard to generate the answers.
Year of reckoning for Big Tech
Kris Reyes for CBC News:
If 2021 had a battle cry for U.S. lawmakers facing off with the world’s biggest tech companies, it would be this: “Legislation is coming.”
This year, lawmakers went beyond just grilling companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, collectively known as Big Tech.
They tabled new legislation.
A succinct month-by-month summary of what the U.S. Congress worked on last year on this matter.
The complicated legacy of E.O. Wilson
Monica R. McLemore for Scientific American:
His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought this way was a huge disappointment, because I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.
I, too, was very much influenced by the works of E. O. Wilson, who passed away on Boxing Day. I still have a copy of Sociobiology, which helped me form the bulk of my postgraduate research proposal on the ecology and ethology of urban primates. Sometimes I look back and wonder what kind of ethologist I would have been if I pursued that career. My university years were extreme, and not often in a good way. As insinuated by the text above, those years were littered with being thiiiiis close to many extreme ideas. I was thiiiiis close to… being a proponent of eugenics. I was thiiiiis close to… being a TERF. I could go on, but I probably shouldn’t.
Today, you may wonder why I still ‘turn to biology’ in my analysis of Big Tech and machine learning and data privacy and protection, and so on—and I don’t blame you. But really, even AI researchers are doing the same, as reported by Allison Whitten for Quanta Magazine.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading ‘After ALS struck, he became the world’s most advanced cyborg,’ about scientist Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan by LaVonne Roberts for Input.
I’m watching Death to 2021 on Netflix.
Chart of the week
Last year’s $94 trillion world economy as reported by Dorothy Neufeld from the Visual Capitalist :
(Thanks, Ed, for the link.)