[AI Skeptics] summer catch-up week 2
Hello! We're starting our next book (Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser) soon. You can order it from the publisher's page, or from bookshop.org.
Please order Techno-Negative as soon as you can; we'll officially start on June 29.
In the meantime, let's read and watch some stuff from around the web and talk about it. This week, let's read/listen to 2 or 3 things:
- Brian Merchant's latest essay "How to use AI doom marketing to dupe the media and rake in billions in 10 easy steps"
- Ed Zitron's piece "AI's Brokenomics"
- Ed Ongweso Jr and Jathan Sadowski's latest episode of This Machine Kills: "The Book of Ludd"
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Ok, let's get back to the rest of the thing.
routine stuff
As a reminder, there are numerous ways to keep up with the reading group:
- newsletter: I send updates on Mondays and Thursdays. In the Monday updates, I'll point to what to read; in the Thursday updates, I'll send some reflections and an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat.
- video chats: Thursdays at 8pm ET we have a video chat on jitsi2 where we talk about this week's readings.
- group chat: if you want to chat with people on signal, we have a pretty active group chat. You can join the signal group chat here.
I have ideas for what we'll read after Techno-Negative, but if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
last thoughts
If you come across something you think we'd like to read, I'd love to hear about it; contact me.
Okay, that's it; see you Thursday to chat about the articles and the podcast episode from this week.
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Zotero is a free, open-source resource management software. Sometimes people use it to keep track of papers and other resources they want to cite in their writing; in our case, it's serving as a place where articles, papers, books, podcasts, etc... that come up in conversations in signal, video chats, emails, etc... can be saved. ↩
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I use Jitsi for video chats. Jitsi is a free web-based video chat service kind of like Zoom, but it's free, absent of generative AI stuff, and not connected to people's work accounts. ↩
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If you've made (written, recorded, etc...) something you'd like to share - a zine, an blog post, an academic paper, a video, or whatever else - email me or message me on signal. ↩