[Petit Fours #403] On AI in the street, design ethics at work, and permission to play
Hi, everyone! Launching into a week of fully autumnal weather and a flurry of todos, here’s what I’ve got for you:
#1 Sharon Lindberg will be defending her PhD thesis, Design Ethics at Work, on October 18: “The complexity of introducing ethics into technology design practices and the need to support practitioners’ ethical awareness and action are widely recognized in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. However, although there has been extensive research and numerous academic proposals on these issues, these research results are often underused in practice. Addressing this gap, this thesis examines how design practitioners in the digital technology industry understand, do, and envision ethics at work. This is investigated through qualitative approaches, including semi-structured interviews and co-design workshops.“
#2 The question this NYMag article asks would be even more funny if it weren’t so painfully spot-on: Is That AI? Or Does It Just Suck? “Exciting, fast-changing tools with enormous theoretical potential are being used, in the real world, right now, to produce near-infinite quantities of bad-to-not-very-good stuff. In part, it’s a disconnect between forward-looking narratives and hype and lagging actual capabilities; it also illustrates a gap between how people imagine they might use knowledge-work automation and how it actually gets used. More than either of these things, though, it’s an example of the difference between the impressive and empowering feeling of using new AI tools and the far more common experience of having AI tools used on you — between generating previously impossible quantities of passable emails, documents, and imagery and being on the receiving end of all that new production.”
#3 For a more uplifting look at AI, check out outcomes from the AI in the Street project.
#4 And for something completely different, this piece gave me both pause and inspiration: What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Street?
-A