Category: Uncategorized
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Forthcoming in Philosophy and Social Criticism; preprint here on SSRN. Here is the abstract: “Algorithmic governance is sometimes compared to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here I argue that, while algorithmic governance shares some similarities with the Hobbesian schema, it goes further in its suppression of contestation. To show this, I read Hobbes against Rancière’s reduction of him…
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I’ve spent a lot of time on the various ways that language models are sociotechnical artifacts, and in particular the ways that they need to be thought of as normatively saturated. An large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT, for example, will pick up the patterns of language use in its training data, so a model…
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I am also sure you don’t, because the disease is made-up. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop major LLMs from credulously talking about it. Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a Swedish researcher, wrote a couple of obviously fake papers inventing the condition and put them on a preprint server. Within weeks, according to this report in Nature by Chris…
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Citing a paper by Lisanne Bainbridge from the early 1980s, Carl Hendrick describes a paradox of automation. Those who automate systems tend to view people as the weak link, and thus replace humans with automation wherever possible. This leaves a problem: “The designer who tries to eliminate the operator still leaves the operator to do…
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In the context of LLMs, alignment means, more or less, that the models give answers either that we find suitable or that are suited to the task. A model that is misaligned behaves in inappropriate ways. For example, when a mental health chatbot tells someone to kill themselves, that’s misalignment. Sycophancy is a more subtle…
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I have been working through (part 1, part 2, part 3) some of what Foucault says about anthropology in his 1954-5 course at Lille, recently published as La question anthropologique. Last time, I focused on (1) Heidegger’s reading of Kant and (2) contrasted that with Foucault’s. Here, I’ll track how Foucault connects his Kant reading…
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I have been working through (part 1, part 2) some of what Foucault says about anthropology in his 1954-5 course at Lille, recently published as La question anthropologique. In particular, Foucault’s course pays careful attention to Feuerbach, a figure who is notably absent by the time of Order of Things. Where does the emphasis come…
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Late last fall, an interdisciplinary group at UNC Charlotte that included me put together a position paper on AI literacy. The goal is to push back against the tendency to treat AI literacy as skills development, and to create space for human agency in using (or not using!) AI. As universities rush headlong to develop…
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Last time, I setup a question about Foucault’s anti-humanism. His comments in Order of Things are famous, and the recent publication of a 1954-5 lecture course he delivered at Lille as La question anthropologique offers a chance to think about the evolution of his thought on the subject. One clue that something is different is…
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Foucault published Madness and Civilization in 1961; before that, there was relatively little published work, and his early career work of the 1950s has been neglected until quite recently. Some of it is starting to appear, in particular work that he did at the University of Lille: two manuscripts: one on Binswanger and Existential Analysis…
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