February 25, 2023 | permalink
I’m thrilled and honored to be among the dozens of visionaries and critics quoted in Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center’s new report on the future of human agency in a world of ubiquitous AI. Considering the rapid advances — and all-too-obvious lack of oversight — when it comes to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this report could not have arrived at a better time.
I’m batting ninth in a murderer’s row including Douglas Rushkoff, Devin Fidler, danah boyd, Jamais Cascio, Paul Saffo, and Ben Waber — and those are just the people I happen to know! — but I’m happy to share my contributions nonetheless:
“Humans will be out of the loop of many important decisions by 2035, but they shouldn’t be. And the reasons will have less to do with the evolution of the technology than politics, both big and small. For example, given current technological trajectories, we see a bias toward large, unsupervised models such as GPT-3 or DALL-E 2 trained on datasets riddled with cognitive and discriminatory biases using largely unsupervised methods. This produces results that can sometimes feel like magic (or ‘sapience,’ as one Google engineer has insisted) but will more often than not produce results that can’t be queried or audited.
“I expect to see an acceleration of automated decision-making in any area where the politics of such a decision are contentious – areas where hard-coding and obscuring the apparatus are useful to those with power and deployed on those who do not.
“In the face of seemingly superior results and magical outcomes – e.g., an algorithm trained on historical crime rates to ‘predict’ future crimes – will be unthinkingly embraced by the powers that be. Why? First, because the results of automated decision-making along these lines will preserve the current priorities and prerogatives of institutions and the elites who benefit from them. A ‘pre-crime’ system built on the algorithm described above and employed by police departments will not only post outcomes ad infinitum, it will be useful for police to do so. Second, removing decisions from human hands and placing them under the authority of ‘the algorithm,’ it will only make it that much more difficult to question and challenge the underlying premises of the decisions being made.”
» Folllow me on Twitter.
» Email me.
» See upcoming events.
Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a 2022-2023 urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he leads The Metaverse Metropolis — a new initiative exploring the implications of augmented reality at urban scale. He is also a senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, a senior advisor to Climate Alpha, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative.
December 01, 2023
“The Age of Principled AI” (Video)
November 28, 2023
Fast Company & Curbed: Cars broke Los Angeles. Could a new form of transit fix it?
November 14, 2023
Have Deck, Will Travel: Fall 2023
November 13, 2023
Welcome to the Age of “Principled AI”
----- | August 3, 2023
----- | July 1, 2023
CityLab | June 12, 2023
Augmented Reality Is Coming for Cities
CityLab | April 25, 2023
The Line Is Blurring Between Remote Workers and Tourists
CityLab | December 7, 2021
The Dark Side of 15-Minute Grocery Delivery
Fast Company | June 2021
Why the Great Lakes need to be the center of our climate strategy
Fast Company | March 2020
How to design a smart city that’s built on empowerment–not corporate surveillance
URBAN-X | December 2019
CityLab | December 10, 2018
The State of Play: Connected Mobility in San Francisco, Boston, and Detroit
Harvard Business Review | September 24, 2018
Why Companies Are Creating Their Own Coworking Spaces
CityLab | July 2018
The State of Play: Connected Mobility + U.S. Cities
Medium | May 1, 2017
Fast Company | January 19, 2017
The Collaboration Software That’s Rejuvenating The Young Global Leaders Of Davos
The Guardian | January 13, 2017
What If Uber Kills Public Transport Instead of Cars
Backchannel | January 4, 2017
The Office of the Future Is… an Office
New Cities Foundation | October 2016
Now Arriving: A Connected Mobility Roadmap for Public Transport
Inc. | October 2016
Why Every Business Should Start in a Co-Working Space
Popular Mechanics | May 11, 2016
Can the World’s Worst Traffic Problem Be Solved?
The New Republic | January/February 2016
Fast Company | September 22, 2015
We Spent Two Weeks Wearing Employee Trackers: Here’s What We Learned