Great stuff. Signed. I like how you wrote the section about rationality as a preferred but not exclusive pathway to knowledge. As to these three frameworks, I think that a pragmatist can strategically act like an optimist or pessimist in particular contexts but needs ultimately to avoid extending that viewpoint to the level of the systemic or the universal. I think of this pragmatic viewpoint as having an a posteriori mode of operation to it rooted in its empiricism. We speak to specific contexts only. Jumping from the specific to the general is something we resist unless the evidence compels us. That said, as a manifesto, I recommend resisting the urge to over clarify every word and clause. Each section should have a call and response cadence that circulates around the extreme options this position is not. The current draft does this nicely. Thanks for putting so many of my thoughts into word.
At the same time, Guy is onto something. There are ethical values immanent this piece that do have potential universal reach, and surprising, in this moment, this quasi relativist is okay with that. This values need to be underlined and emphasized. I feel this very strongly in this moment and context. 😋
Nick and Alejandro, thank you for considering the point I raised. Let me expand a bit and explain. The thing that has struck me most, as an instructional technologist working with faculty on AI this year across all disciplines, is the extent to which they are having to learn to see new connections between technology, ethics, and their own fields, then work out how to teach it to their students. Before I got into instructional technology a quarter century ago, I was a historian. I did not have a formal background in the history of technology, as I didn't realize for a long time where my interests were taking me in the 80s, but I learned a great deal about the interactions of technology and early modern cultures that has remained useful to me. So to me, helping people understand the relationships between technology (and individual technologies) and cultures is vital. It would facilitate necessary dialogs and might make faster and better responses to technologies possible.
I like this. A lot. I think I’d like to see a little more on our commitment to understanding the impact on the planet of our tech choices. There’s a lot of digital waste produced by our efforts that ought to be factored into our thinking.
I think you touched on the impact to the environment in the original text. I’d like to see that flushed out a bit.
I admire the effort to manifesto a level-headed response to those writing about technology from the extremes. I notice that you bump up against pragmatism as a philosophical tradition here and in your essay What is Truth? but you don't dig in much to what James and Dewey have to say directly on these questions. I think you'd find their writing helpful in sketching out what techno-pragmatism as a social movement might look like. They were writing more than a hundred years ago, so some of the problems we're wrestling with were not visible to them, but others such as how science works in a democracy and the relationship between capitalism and social change driven by technology were very much their concern. Thanks for the thoughtful writing at the intersection of philosophy and machine learning tech, and congratulations on hitting 2,000 subscribers!
Thanks for your kind words! I've read some of Dewey's but only superficially and by third accounts, so yes, I want to dig deeper. Any suggestions on where to get started?
William James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking is the core text for me. I find Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the best place to start for solid descriptions of philosophical ideas, so its overviews of C.S. Peirce, James, and Dewey would be good place to start online. Dave Karpf has an essay on his Substack, The Future, Now and Then called "On technological optimism and technological pragmatism" that inspired me to dig my copy of James out of a box of old books. I won't clog your comments section with self-promotion links but I have a essay on my Substack that reads James for relevance today...you can follow the breadcrumbs from my profile.
Signing up for this. There are many trade-offs, and humans offer important context and we need better ways to bring together a global consensus. Managing value and impact across the planet is a difficult task as people tend to be mired in their locale and impervious to the rest of the world. There are psychological and ecological effects that come from the distribution of the technologies. we need more systems thinking and sci-tech literacy to avoid people following the optimist/pessimist routes and understanding that they are the ultimate decision makers but also need to bridge gaps of knowledge and support their fellow humans in learning. As machines get fed more information to process and disseminate, it's important to recognize the fallacies of such tech as well.
You can sign me up! Thanks for doing the revisions. I am thinking about how we pragmatists don’t make quite the splash that the other sides do. We are measured in our response. We just don’t piss off as many people. Might not bode well for the movement as an internet phenomenon. But good ideas sometimes need a longer incubation period.
I need to reread this but I liked it a lot. Vitalik Butering published a post on his blog some weeks ago that is in the same line. I found it very interesting and I'm publishing a sort of review of it in January.
I think I would sign onto this as well, although I'd want to reread carefully a few times to be sure... but the intention is right, and this is very well thought out.
I might add that I don't think that the biggest obstacle is the free market. It's probably also one of the greatest drivers of progress, but perverse incentives happen with or without government intervention (sometimes also because of it). With that said, the best tool against this tendency is education, and that's what you're doing here. Well done!
Alejandro, I stumbled across this in notes, thus I am new to your blog and lacking context, so some of what I say may be material you have discussed elsewhere. I read through this twice to ensure I understood things. The first time through, the paragraph about markets perplexed me. On rereading, I think I understand that you want to allow markets to operate within limits and acknowledge there are times when markets might not be appropriate. I'm struggling with this, in part because of negative feelings I have towards markets, but also because of the very complex maneuvering of businesses, financiers, the military, and the intelligence establishment in the creation and dissemination of many technologies. This portion troubles me.
I would like to suggest that educators at all levels and most disciplines have an additional duty. So much of our trouble with technology today may relate to our tendency to see it in isolation. We tend to do that with new technologies, failing to see how they are going to interact with other technologies; affect, or be affected by other aspects of society, economics, and culture; and understand their psychological and ecological effects. We also do this with technology as a whole. We need to help children, adolescents,and college students understand these connections and effects so they can make the kinds of informed value judgements you desire.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I sympathize with both points. Re: markets, I'm also extremely wary of unthetered capitalism, but I still believe there's a role for the type of distributed decision making and resource allocation that happens in well-designed markets. Regarding your second point about embracing a holistic view of technology, absolutely agree, I'll try to squeeze it in because I believe it's a crucial point.
“We have stressed our planet’s resources to dangerous levels, so we might well be the last generation to enjoy this surplus of resources if we continue on this path.”
More nuanced, but not right. There is no evidence that we will run out of oil, gas, coal or other sources of energy any time soon.
Those sources are out of favor in some very vocal political circles but it is only Malthusian fever dreams that we must choose to stop those cheap and abundent sources of energy or be the last generation on Earth.
Not that we are not facing significant issues, we definitely are. One serious risk technology actually presents is the ability to amplify divisive messages on social media and turn us against each other, to target and censor accurate viewpoints, and to push demonstrably false narratives at scale.
However, I don’t think you are going in this direction with your document.
Another is the poisoning influence of DEI on campus. But depending on where you work, even raising a legitimate question could cost you your livelihood.
I like what you are doing, balancing forces off against each other, and raising the stakes, while calling for informed evidence-based policy decisions. That’s great.
Your credibility rests on your accuracy. Resist the temptation to over-reach, especially in those areas where hypebole abounds.
Thanks, those are very fair points, I'll make my best effort to address them. I did have the intention to touch upon the dangers of censorship and missinformation but I think it got spread out too thin in the overall message.
Great stuff. Signed. I like how you wrote the section about rationality as a preferred but not exclusive pathway to knowledge. As to these three frameworks, I think that a pragmatist can strategically act like an optimist or pessimist in particular contexts but needs ultimately to avoid extending that viewpoint to the level of the systemic or the universal. I think of this pragmatic viewpoint as having an a posteriori mode of operation to it rooted in its empiricism. We speak to specific contexts only. Jumping from the specific to the general is something we resist unless the evidence compels us. That said, as a manifesto, I recommend resisting the urge to over clarify every word and clause. Each section should have a call and response cadence that circulates around the extreme options this position is not. The current draft does this nicely. Thanks for putting so many of my thoughts into word.
At the same time, Guy is onto something. There are ethical values immanent this piece that do have potential universal reach, and surprising, in this moment, this quasi relativist is okay with that. This values need to be underlined and emphasized. I feel this very strongly in this moment and context. 😋
Nick and Alejandro, thank you for considering the point I raised. Let me expand a bit and explain. The thing that has struck me most, as an instructional technologist working with faculty on AI this year across all disciplines, is the extent to which they are having to learn to see new connections between technology, ethics, and their own fields, then work out how to teach it to their students. Before I got into instructional technology a quarter century ago, I was a historian. I did not have a formal background in the history of technology, as I didn't realize for a long time where my interests were taking me in the 80s, but I learned a great deal about the interactions of technology and early modern cultures that has remained useful to me. So to me, helping people understand the relationships between technology (and individual technologies) and cultures is vital. It would facilitate necessary dialogs and might make faster and better responses to technologies possible.
I like this. A lot. I think I’d like to see a little more on our commitment to understanding the impact on the planet of our tech choices. There’s a lot of digital waste produced by our efforts that ought to be factored into our thinking.
I think you touched on the impact to the environment in the original text. I’d like to see that flushed out a bit.
Very good point, I'll squeeze it in.
I admire the effort to manifesto a level-headed response to those writing about technology from the extremes. I notice that you bump up against pragmatism as a philosophical tradition here and in your essay What is Truth? but you don't dig in much to what James and Dewey have to say directly on these questions. I think you'd find their writing helpful in sketching out what techno-pragmatism as a social movement might look like. They were writing more than a hundred years ago, so some of the problems we're wrestling with were not visible to them, but others such as how science works in a democracy and the relationship between capitalism and social change driven by technology were very much their concern. Thanks for the thoughtful writing at the intersection of philosophy and machine learning tech, and congratulations on hitting 2,000 subscribers!
Thanks for your kind words! I've read some of Dewey's but only superficially and by third accounts, so yes, I want to dig deeper. Any suggestions on where to get started?
William James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking is the core text for me. I find Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the best place to start for solid descriptions of philosophical ideas, so its overviews of C.S. Peirce, James, and Dewey would be good place to start online. Dave Karpf has an essay on his Substack, The Future, Now and Then called "On technological optimism and technological pragmatism" that inspired me to dig my copy of James out of a box of old books. I won't clog your comments section with self-promotion links but I have a essay on my Substack that reads James for relevance today...you can follow the breadcrumbs from my profile.
I will! Thanks ;)
Signing up for this. There are many trade-offs, and humans offer important context and we need better ways to bring together a global consensus. Managing value and impact across the planet is a difficult task as people tend to be mired in their locale and impervious to the rest of the world. There are psychological and ecological effects that come from the distribution of the technologies. we need more systems thinking and sci-tech literacy to avoid people following the optimist/pessimist routes and understanding that they are the ultimate decision makers but also need to bridge gaps of knowledge and support their fellow humans in learning. As machines get fed more information to process and disseminate, it's important to recognize the fallacies of such tech as well.
A fantastic and balanced counter-response to the now-infamous Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto." I can get on board with this!
Thanks! All feedback is more than welcome 🤗
Nicolas Potkalitsky, Ph.D., AI Literacy and Education, USA
You can sign me up! Thanks for doing the revisions. I am thinking about how we pragmatists don’t make quite the splash that the other sides do. We are measured in our response. We just don’t piss off as many people. Might not bode well for the movement as an internet phenomenon. But good ideas sometimes need a longer incubation period.
Yeah, slow growth is a side effect of being level-headed, I guess. We're not in this for the flashy headlines.
How do you want to sign?
I need to reread this but I liked it a lot. Vitalik Butering published a post on his blog some weeks ago that is in the same line. I found it very interesting and I'm publishing a sort of review of it in January.
Oh, cool! Can you share a link?
There you go https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html
By the way, I was in the faculty but you weren't there 🥲. Maybe I go again before returning to Spain on January, 10th
This is very good. Let's spread it far and wide.
I think I would sign onto this as well, although I'd want to reread carefully a few times to be sure... but the intention is right, and this is very well thought out.
I might add that I don't think that the biggest obstacle is the free market. It's probably also one of the greatest drivers of progress, but perverse incentives happen with or without government intervention (sometimes also because of it). With that said, the best tool against this tendency is education, and that's what you're doing here. Well done!
Thanks man, happy to incorporate any specific feedback if you later reread it and want to add anything
Alejandro, I stumbled across this in notes, thus I am new to your blog and lacking context, so some of what I say may be material you have discussed elsewhere. I read through this twice to ensure I understood things. The first time through, the paragraph about markets perplexed me. On rereading, I think I understand that you want to allow markets to operate within limits and acknowledge there are times when markets might not be appropriate. I'm struggling with this, in part because of negative feelings I have towards markets, but also because of the very complex maneuvering of businesses, financiers, the military, and the intelligence establishment in the creation and dissemination of many technologies. This portion troubles me.
I would like to suggest that educators at all levels and most disciplines have an additional duty. So much of our trouble with technology today may relate to our tendency to see it in isolation. We tend to do that with new technologies, failing to see how they are going to interact with other technologies; affect, or be affected by other aspects of society, economics, and culture; and understand their psychological and ecological effects. We also do this with technology as a whole. We need to help children, adolescents,and college students understand these connections and effects so they can make the kinds of informed value judgements you desire.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I sympathize with both points. Re: markets, I'm also extremely wary of unthetered capitalism, but I still believe there's a role for the type of distributed decision making and resource allocation that happens in well-designed markets. Regarding your second point about embracing a holistic view of technology, absolutely agree, I'll try to squeeze it in because I believe it's a crucial point.
Thanks! Definitely a more nuanced claim could fit better. I'll give it a shot :)
I think it's a bit more nuanced now.
“We have stressed our planet’s resources to dangerous levels, so we might well be the last generation to enjoy this surplus of resources if we continue on this path.”
More nuanced, but not right. There is no evidence that we will run out of oil, gas, coal or other sources of energy any time soon.
Those sources are out of favor in some very vocal political circles but it is only Malthusian fever dreams that we must choose to stop those cheap and abundent sources of energy or be the last generation on Earth.
Not that we are not facing significant issues, we definitely are. One serious risk technology actually presents is the ability to amplify divisive messages on social media and turn us against each other, to target and censor accurate viewpoints, and to push demonstrably false narratives at scale.
However, I don’t think you are going in this direction with your document.
Another is the poisoning influence of DEI on campus. But depending on where you work, even raising a legitimate question could cost you your livelihood.
I like what you are doing, balancing forces off against each other, and raising the stakes, while calling for informed evidence-based policy decisions. That’s great.
Your credibility rests on your accuracy. Resist the temptation to over-reach, especially in those areas where hypebole abounds.
Thanks, those are very fair points, I'll make my best effort to address them. I did have the intention to touch upon the dangers of censorship and missinformation but I think it got spread out too thin in the overall message.
Great job!