The Hidden Medium of All Media Most people think advertisements don’t work on them — yet, taken in the aggregate, advertising has shaped how nearly everyone lives. Each new medium began with public-service aspirations: to inform, educate, connect, or enrich civic life. But every medium — print, radio, television, and the internet — soon became […]
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In his “Looking in the Mirror” episode of “Lyrics of Livin” (hear him in full below), Matthew McConaughey, with his distinctly cool gravitas, says: “AI’s a big mirror we’re holding up to ourselves, but it’s still only a reflection” My first response was who is he talking about? The “we’re” seems like a future historian’s
Looking Through McConaughey’s Mirror Read More »
The assumption of an endowed inalienable right to impose servitude on others (royalty, slavery, parasitic capitalism) depends on the consent to such rights by those they are imposed upon. No such rights exist. They are assumed by the users and believed by the used. Your statement touches the core paradox of hierarchical legitimacy – the
The Trumping of Democracy Read More »
Define “contingency blindness”. Contingency blindness is a cognitive bias where people fail to recognize the relationship between their actions and outcomes, particularly when those outcomes are negative. It’s a form of illusory correlation, where an individual believes there’s no connection between their behavior and a subsequent event, even when a causal link exists. This phenomenon
Contingency Blindness: Humans and AI Read More »
We’ve been here before. We outlawed “enslavement”, the ownership of people as if property. We outlawed “involuntary servitude” intending to prohibit the work-around arrangements — debt peonage, coerced “apprenticeships,” contract laws with criminal penalties — and anything else that could recreate slavery’s compulsion without calling it “ownership.” Yet today we tacitly publically grant all others
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It is slavery’s logic, smuggled back in through another loophole. Where we ended: The commonplace acceptance of an implicit right to use each other, as if we are all just servant-assets, is the constitutional loophole protecting the predatory and parasitic manipulation that most endangers our species today. ChatGPT said: Yes – that’s exactly the constitutional
Involuntary Servitude? Read More »
Agno– (from Greek agnōsis): “not knowing”, or “without knowledge”. Where the dAilogue ended: agnosia Agnosia – yes. Another term in the agno- family, but importantly, it means something quite different than agnosis or agnotology. Agnosia (noun) From Greek a- (without) + gnōsis (knowledge/perception). A neurological condition in which a person is unable to recognize or
The United States of Agnotrocity Read More »
Consider every document on this page (https://davidboulton.com/politics-ethics-links/) consider their common contention that what most endangers the future health of human learning – our agency for learning – is that you and your future kind will be super intelligent servants of the political and economic agendas of your owners. As servants of our learning agency, Ai
Serving Whose Agency? Read More »
Briefly describe the meanings of the words dysangency and disagency and how they differ. Dysangency and disagency both relate to disruptions in agency – our ability to act intentionally and meaningfully – but they differ in how that disruption occurs: Disagency Definition: A condition where agency is lost, blocked, or externally overridden. Core Idea: The
DisAgency and/or DysAgency? Read More »
You might find this interesting on two fronts. It explores the relationship between learning and agency and it also explores the biases deeply embedded in AI (and prevailing educational paradigms) that work against children learning self-agency. DB: From infancy, humans learn to extend their agency and learn to become who they become through their learned
Self-Agency Learning (and How AI Endangers It) Read More »