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We will never agree about AI until we agree about what it means to live a good life. Current debates* about artificial intelligence circle endlessly around questions of capability, economic impact, and resource allocation – not to mention language. Is AI truly useful? What will it do to jobs? How much should we invest in its development? And what do we mean by AI? What’s the difference between machine learning and large language modeling? What can one do that the other cannot? What happens when we mix them up? These discussions are necessary, but will continue to be maddening without backing up some and widening the scope. Meanwhile, it often feels like we’re arguing about the objective merit of a right-hand turn over a left without first agreeing where we’re trying to go. The real questions about AI are actually questions about human flourishing. How much of a person’s life should be determined by work? What level of labor should be necessary to meet basic needs? Where do we draw the line between necessity and luxury? How should people derive contentment and meaning? Without wrestling with these fundamental questions, our AI debates are just technical discussions floating free of human context. Consider how differently we might approach AI development if we had clear answers about what constitutes a good human life. If we believed that meaningful work is essential to human flourishing, we’d focus the development of AI on human augmentation while being vigilant of how it might replace human function. We’d carefully choose how it is applied, leveraging machine-learning systems to analyze datasets beyond our comprehension and move scientific investigations forward, but withhold its use in areas that derive value from human creativity. If we thought that freedom from labor was the path to human fulfillment, we’d push AI toward maximum automation and do the work of transitioning from a labor and resource-driven capitalist system to a completely different structure. We would completely remake the world, starting with the lives of those who inhabit it. But without this philosophical foundation, we’re left with market forces, technological momentum, and environmental pressures shaping our future by default. The details of human life become outputs of these systems rather than conscious choices guided by shared values. As abstract as this may sound, it is as essential as any technical detail that differentiates one model from another. Every investment in AI derives from a worldview which, at best, prefers maintaining the structural status quo, or at worst, desires a further widening of the gap between economic power and poverty. Every adoption layer of large language models reinforces the picture of society drawn by just one piece of it — the internet — and as dependence upon these systems increases, so does the reality distortion. The transition from index-driven search engines to AI-driven research engines reaches a nearly gaslight level of affirming a certain kind of truth; a referral, after all, is a different kind of truth-builder than an answer. And though both systems draw from exactly the same information, one will persuade its users more directly. Its perception will be reality. Unless, of course, we say otherwise. We’re building the infrastructure of future human experience without explicitly discussing what that experience should be. To be sure, many humans have shared worldviews. Some are metaphysical in nature, if not explicitly religious. Some are maintained independent of economic and technological forces, if not in direct rejection of them. Among the many pockets of human civilization rooted in pre-digital traditions, the inexorable supremacy of AI likely looks like an apocalypse they’d prefer to avoid. I am not saying we all must live and believe as others do. A shared picture of human flourishing does not require a totalitarian trickle-down demand on every detail of day-to-day life. But it must be defined enough to help answer questions, particularly about technology, that are relevant to anyone alive. The most urgent conversation about AI isn’t about its capabilities or risks, but about the kind of life we want it to help us create. Until we grapple with these deeper questions about human flourishing, our technical debates will continue to miss the point and further alienate us from one another. This from Robin Sloan vs. this from Baldur Bjarnason vs. this from Michelle Barker, for example. All thoughtful, offering nuance and good points, but also missing one another.
Stoked Associates redefines workplace design with a human-centric approach, blending local graphics, biophilic elements, and smart solutions to create a...
I’m currently looking to add a search feature to my blog. It’s a client-side approach, which means I was planning on using my favorite progressive-enhancement technique for client-side only search: you point a search form at Google, scope the results to your site, then use JavaScript to intercept the form submission and customize the experience on your site to your heart’s content. <form action="https://www.google.com/search"> <input type="text" name="q" placeholder="Search" /> <input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="blog.jim-nielsen.com" /> <button type="submit">Search</button> </form> <script> document.querySelector("form").addEventListener("submit", (e) => { e.preventDefault(); // Do my client-side search stuff here // and stay on the current page }); </script> However, then I remembered that Google Search no longer works without JavaScript which means this trick is no longer a trick. [1] But have no fear, other search engines to the rescue! DuckDuckGo, for example, supports this trick. Tweak some of the HTML from the Google example and it’ll work: <form action="https://duckduckgo.com"> <input type="text" name="q" placeholder="Search" /> <input type="hidden" name="sites" value="blog.jim-nielsen.com" /> <button type="submit">Search</button> </form> <script> document.querySelector("form").addEventListener("submit", (e) => { e.preventDefault(); // Do my client-side search stuff here // and stay on the current page }); </script> Yahoo also supports this trick, but not Bing. You can point people at Bing, but you can’t scope a query to your site only with an HTML form submission alone. Why? Because you need two search params: 1) a “query” param representing what the user typed into the search box, and 2) a “site search” param to denote which site you want to limit your results to (otherwise it’ll search the whole web). From a UI perspective, if a search box is on your site, user intent is to search the content on your site. You don’t want to require people to type “my keywords site:blog.jim-nielsen.com” when they’re using a search box on your site — that’s just silly! That’s why you need a second search parameter you can set yourself (a hidden input). You can’t concatenate something onto the end of a user’s HTML form submission. (What they type in the input box is what gets sent to the search engine as the ?q=... param.) To add to the q param, you would need JavaScript — but then that defeats the whole purpose of this exercise in the first place! Anyhow, here are the search parameters I found useful for search engines that will support this trick: DuckDuckGo: Query: q Site search param: sites Yahoo Query: p Site search param: vs I made myself a little test page for trying all these things. Check it out (and disable JS) if you want to try yourself! Not only that, but the as_sitesearch search param doesn’t seem to work anymore either. I can’t find any good documentation on what happened to as_sitesearch, but it seems like you’re supposed to use the “programmable search” now instead? Honestly I don’t know. And I don’t care enough to find out. ⏎ Email :: Mastodon :: Bluesky #progressiveEnhancement
The packaging design for Vita-Care vitamin tablets was developed with the aim of attracting more attention from the target audience....
This is the second part of a series on the identity of social networks: