Harris describes social media as the ‘first contact with AI’ with huge unintended consequences following from the seemingly innocuous aspiration to maximise engagement. We’re now seeing a ‘second contact’ in which we move from machine curation to machine creation:
Their capacity to talk about the ‘race dynamic’ driving this without talking about the political economy of the technology sector is rather impressive. As with their other work, this is a prime example of tech humanism. Even so there’s a lot of value in this talk, particularly their focus on the significance of intimacy as a turning point in the social consequences of these developments.
Mark Carrigan 