Why AI must be decolonized to fulfill its true potential by [[Mahlet Zimeta]], Data and technology policy expert, Freelance

Successful Secretary Presented by Royal Office Typewriters. A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production, 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5b2FiDaLk.

Script: Lee Thuna<br /> Educational Consultant: Catharine Stevens<br /> Assistant Director: Willis F. Briley<br /> Design: Francisco Reynders<br /> Director & Producer: Carl A. Carbone<br /> A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production

"Mother the mail"

gendered subservience

"coding boobytraps"

"I think you'll like the half sheet better. It is faster." —Mr. Typewriter, timestamp

A little bit of the tone of "HAL" from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is particularly suggestive as H.A.L. was a one letter increment from I.B.M. and the 1966 Royal 660 was designed to compete with IBM's Selectric

This calm voice makes suggestions to a secretary while H.A.L. does it for a male astronaut (a heroic figure of the time period). Suddenly the populace feels the computer might be a bad actor.

"We're living in an electric world, more speed and less effort."—Mr. Typewriter<br /> (techno-utopianism)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

The 710 freeway displaced a large number of people between 1965 and 1974 in West Pasadena.

In den USA führen wachsende Datencenter, die u.a. durch die Industriepolitik steigende Produktion in Fabriken und immer mehr Elektrofahrzeuge zu einem steilen Anstieg des Bedarfs nach Elektrizität. Der zusätzliche Verbrauch wird in fünf Jahren etwa dem jetzigen Kaliforniens entsprechen. Die bestehenden Klimaziele werden dadurch gefährdet. Viele neue Gaskraftwerke werden bereits projektiert, unter anderem, weil die Regulierungen fossile Energien begünstigen. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/13/climate/electric-power-climate-change.html

Why is it that so many of Americans' gut reactions is to "kick the can down the road" rather than to solve the underlying problems?

simultaneously one should speak truth to the dis-empowered and dis-enfranchised to rise up against those who have power as a check to that power.

we often conveniently ignore Locke on slavery...

Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Verso Books, 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2649-how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline.

Aram Zucker-Scharff indicated that this was one of his favorite books on the climate crisis and has interesting consequences for both individual and group action. He said it might make an interesting pairing with Palo Alto (@Malcolm2023).

It came up as we were talking about the ideas of climate crisis in the overlap of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Might also be interesting with respect to @Hoffer2002 [1951].

Who get's to make decisions?

Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

Context: Lindsey Graham had just proposed a bill for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

McConnell's position seems to be one that choice about abolition is an option, but one which is reserved for white men of power over others. This is painful because that choice is being left to people without any of the information and nuance about specific circumstances versus the pregnant women themselves potentially in consultation with their doctors who have broad specific training and experience in the topics and issues at hand. Why are these leaders attempting to make decisions based on possibilities rather than realities, particularly when they've not properly studied or are generally aware of any of the realities?

If this is McConnell's true position, then why not punt the decision and choices down to the people directly impacted? And isn't this a long running tenet of the Republican Party to allow greater individual freedoms? Isn't their broad philosophy: individual > state government > national government? (At least with respect to internal, domestic matters; in international matters the opposite relationships seem to dominate.)

tl;dr:<br /> Mitch McConnell believes in choice, just not in your choice.

Here's the actual audio from a similar NPR story:<br /> https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2022/09/20220914_me_gop_sen_lindsey_graham_introduces_15-week_abortion_ban_in_the_senate.mp3#t=206

McConnell is also practicing the Republican party game of "do as I say and not as I do" on Graham directly. He's practicing this sort of hypocrisy because as leadership, he's desperately worried that this move will decimate the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

There's also another reading of McConnell's statement. Viewed as a statement from leadership, there's a form of omerta or silent threat being communicated here to the general Republican Party membership: you better fall in line on the party line here because otherwise we run the risk of losing power. He's saying he's leaving it up to them individually, but in reality, as the owner of the purse strings, he's not.

Thesis:<br /> The broadest distinction between American political parties right now seems to be that the Republican Party wants to practice fascistic forms of "power over" while the Democratic Party wants to practice more democratic forms of "power with".

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/GPS-stolen-car-tracking-17398881.php

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560611614226882560.html

A reframing of what the story of the Tower of Babel means.

The moral of the Tower of Babel is to encourage power with rather than power over.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/05/arts/racist-symbol-or-historical-reminder-debate-over-state-seal/

Of course, no mention of other atrocities inflicted by colonialists in Massachusetts here. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Amherst,_1st_Baron_Amherst)

One really oughtn't downplay their research skills like this, rather they should wear them as a badge of honor. Downplaying them leeches away one's power.

Ph.D. researchers may potentially go deeper into sources, but this is only a function of time and available attention.

This sort of debate also plays out in spaces like writing computer code. The broader industry determines who is and isn't a "coder", but this is only a means of creating power structures that determine who has power and who doesn't or who is part of the conversation and who isn't.

Don't let Maggie fool you here, she is definitely part of this conversation.

What areas of work over time does this pattern of level of experience not apply to?

There is definitely a level of minimal literacy at which one could be considered a reader, but there is no distinction between amateur reader and professional reader the way there might be between an "amateur researcher" and a full time "academic researcher".

Other examples of this? Video game playing?

While she may not have coined the phrase "win-win", Mary Parker Follett's process of integration described in her book Creative Experience (Longmans, Green & Co., 1924) forms the basis of what we now refer to as the idea of "win-win" conflict resolution.

Follett's ideas about power over and power with also stem from Creative Experience as well.

1. Those using the power-over, power-with distinction include Dorothy Emmett, the first woman president of the British Aristotelian Society, and Hannah Arendt; Mans- bridge, ‘‘Mary Parker Follet: Feminist and Negotiator,’’ xviii–xxii.

Syndication link: - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Win%E2%80%93win_game&type=revision&diff=1102353117&oldid=1076197356

https://catswetel.com/blog/2021/5/4/an-extended-subtweet-on-power

Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ

How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?

What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.

Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)

My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

The words "beyond", "hierarchical", and "archaic" are all designed to marginalize prior thought and tools which all work, and are likely upon which this broader idea is built. This is a potentially toxic means of creating "power over" this prior art rather than a more open spirit of "power with".

Similarly Paul Wolfowitz was U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense running the U.S. war in Iraq before leaving to become the 10th President of the World Bank.

McNamara was the 5th President of the World Bank.

https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/4-types-of-power/#comment-122967

Given your area, if you haven't found it yet, you might appreciate going a generation further back in your references with: Mary P. Follett. Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, ed. by E. M. Fox and L. Urwick (London: Pitman Publishing, 1940). She had some interesting work in organization theory you might appreciate. Wikipedia can give you a quick overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett#Organizational_theory

I've seen definitions of the others before but not "power within".

Power over Ethernet (PoE vs PoE+ vs PoE++) makes money Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a network technology that allows us to deliver both data and power over a single standard Ethernet cable. So we can use network cables like Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6/Cat6a cables to provide data connections and power to a Wifi access point, IP camera, VoIP phone, PoE lighting or any other device.

Religious and national divides were likely very important here as authority from above would have been even more important than in modern time. Related to this is the change in mnemonic traditions due to religious and political mores around the time of Peter Ramus.

It's easy to imagine the white men being outnumbered by the amount of enslaved african americans.. now let's think about the white men's fear if suddenly all those african americans were set free..