Robin Sloan on the AI training == human learning argument:
This might be a reasonable argument if AI models operated at the speed and fidelity of human writers and artists. It’s true, Robin Sloan did read a ton of copyrighted books. However, he did not read all the copyrighted books, and even then, the task took him decades. Furthermore, he generates output at the rate of approximately one book every four years, which works out to approximately one token per hour 😉
When capability increases so substantially, the activity under discussion is not “the same thing, only faster”. It is a different activity altogether. Phase change.
Emphasis mine.
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How a Virtual Assistant Taught Me to Appreciate Busywork by Amanda Hess (NYT) – archive link
But when I gave [personal assistant app] Yohana a spin, I found that I did not want to do the things she can manage, and that she cannot manage the things I want to do. She made me start to believe that the busywork I might delegate to a machine is actually more human, and valuable, than I realized.
The apps transform parents from workers into consumers, translating our to-do lists into shopping lists. Somebody is still performing our “joy-stealing” tasks, and it may be a call center worker or one of the many other invisible laborers who make artificial intelligence systems seem to run automatically.
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Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul by Nick Hunt (Noema Mag)
“I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”
— Rebecca Solnit
At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.
(via Dense Discovery)
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the rhythm of processing: daily life vs. travel by Kening Zhu
travel is like a sudden flood of intake for the mind/body to digest — fast.
what causes discomfort is not the sudden inflow; it’s the backlog of things to process.
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Sarah Taber sharing about how there are ag solutions that don’t pit workers and farm owners against each other (start of quote in thread):
If you’re picking fruit in an orchard, you can spend a LOT of your time just climbing up & down ladders. With a basket of fruit strapped to your chest that can weigh up to 50lbs…
All that ladderwork is hazardous- it’s easy to miss a hand or foothold & drop off the ladder when you’re carrying a big weight that’s strapped to you.
But it’s also a bad use of time! The goal is to spend our time getting fruit into bins, not climbing ladders!
An orchardist in Australia did the math. He found that for every hectare (~2.5 acres) of orchard, fruit pickers go up & down ladders so many times that they climb the equivalent of 1.2 Mount Everests.
https://apal.org.au/https-apal-org-au-pedestrian-orchards-keep-workers-safely-on-the-ground/
… So Australian growers came up with a solution: just use shorter trees. No ladders needed.
These so-called pedestrian orchards save a whole lot of time. They can be picked faster, so the fruit gets to market in better shape. You don’t need to hire as many people to do the picking. And it’s way less dangerous for workers.
Everybody wins.
See also:
Human Scale
Time is a Tool of Capitalism
Starving out strikers
