So, Kids and Mobile Phones: The Moral Panic seems to be building to an exciting fever pitch with the publication of Haidt's book.

I have some pragmatic, middle-of-the-road opinions about this, which can be roughly summed up as "Just enough Smartphone". My position is roughly: some things about technology are great, but excessive datafication and corporate capture mean we've ended up in an extractive and exploitative place, in which most of us are making a small number of businesses a great deal of money.

What extraordinary serendipity that in the same week as @simonw writes this eminently sensible post 404 media splash this simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai…
404media.co/cmg-cox-media-… I think I'd go a bit further than Simon's post though, because it seems to me that using our human instincts for what may or may not be trustworthy is an essential line of defence. If the link looks bad, don't click it; if the alleged news story looks like BS, check the source

Quick thread on the state of digital policy in the UK. Interested to know if this reflected in other areas.

In what is, presumably, the last year of a Conservative govt we find ourselves in an odd place that I think is almost peak Theatre of Consultation. Unless I was asleep under a giant rock and missed it, there was no consultation about the formation of the AI Safety Institute, or about the methods of societal impacts that have been selected, which make no reference to human rights and wch appear technocratic at best.

I'm doing a panel this morning on digital inclusion and AI. This is what I'm going to say:
- the paradigm for AI governance the UK govt is working towards deepens social exclusion
- so we need to do two things: challenge the paradigm while also mitigating it Mitigations for structural power imbalances can have the unfortunate outcome of entrenching existing power imbalances so it's important to do both. Being included in an oppressive system can still be oppressive. I wrote about that here medium.com/careful-indust…

Quick thread on Responsible Capability Scaling, one of the safety measures outlined in a @SciTechgovuk paper published yesterday - and why it is both welcome and insufficient. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/653aabbd…
Parts of Responsible Capability Scaling have a lot in common with Consequence Scanning, a tool we developed at @doteveryone in 2018/9, in collaboration with many SMEs, which is freely available and widely used by businesses and research teams doteveryone.org.uk/project/conseq…

Well I guess this is my daily "read the news and complain about today's ridiculous AI story" tweet. Buckle up, I have a thread theguardian.com/technology/202… Firstly, let's look at the headline. Sure, Stuart Russell is an expert, but he's not an expert in either education or child welfare, he's an expert in AI. You know the saying, "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" - well, that applies here. The idea that teaching… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Classic example of this today with the Ask First NHS app, which puts the user (in this case, me) through several minutes of data entry (possibly some sort of theatre of triage) only to return the result that of course there are no GP appointments to be found

https://twitter.com/rachelcoldicutt/status/1658856318126415872

The end point of glitch capitalism is likely to be everyone being so busy signing consent forms for unnecessary data processing that no one notices the world is on fire

Nostalgia does not a set of regulatory policies make. This is *not* a good series of takes, which is a shame as I have of sympathy with the underlying theme on.ft.com/3W8ZS2R The point of the phrase "digital natives" (wch I'm not a fan of, for a lot of reasons that will become clear) isn't to describe ppl who have always used tech: it's an othering phrase, created by those aged 45+ (perhaps "digital settlers" 🤮) to display their bewilderment

.@CarefulTrouble is working with @peoplesbiz to nurture a space of connection and collaboration for people and orgs who are making, using, supporting or are interested in finding out more about community tech. Come along to an events in May to find out more! Details in 🧵 At @knowlewestmedia in Bristol on 19 May we're holding a social event (with a short presentation from @anna_b_dent) for the community tech-curious to come along and say hi to one another eventbrite.com/e/community-te…

This week's Economist appears to be about whether one should be "excited" or "worried" about AI. There's lots of q decent analysis but the binary framing isn't super helpful as a way of understanding the impacts of a diffuse set of technologies twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Worry and excitement are both valid responses to uncertainty, and they don't always happen in opposition. In fact, worry and excitement are often experienced simultaneously. But also, "AI" isn't a single thing, it's shorthand for many diff kinds of automated process.

Seeing lots of speculating on ways gen AI can be deployed to solve humanitarian, educational, health problems today, I'm reminded of this from our @CarefulTrouble exploration of Web3 last year New technologies bring optimism, new energy and new money to long-term, seemingly intractable problems - particularly those caused by systemic inequalities. The "innovation uplift" created by hype creates temporary relief from fatigue careful.industries/blog/2022-11-n…

I get this is trying to describe a vibe (or, more specifically, a movie soundtrack), but Spotify's inability to deal with classical music is quite something Cue: winsome female tentatively examining poetry books in the dappled sunlight of a library corner while listening to Erik Satie

Honestly, guys (and I mean, specifically guys, super-specifically all of you schooled in the narrative tropes of hype and market making and career enhancing), chill out. We have been in this "Omg the exponential!" place before. I'm not saying you're crying wolf, but I am saying that - luckily - we have not had wholesale social, legal, economic reform overnight recently that means change suddenly happens much faster.

This is a great read for food snobs, modern traditionalists and Brexiteers alike

https://twitter.com/gilesyb/status/1639554392440422401

Just like language and grammar, food preparation is bound by so many written and unwritten rules, that become proxies for class and identity and which can also become sites of tremendous insecurity when challenged

Last weekend to apply for these two lovely jobs with @CarefulTrouble. We work a flexible 32-hr 4-day week w/5 weeks' holiday + 4 days' climate leave and are mostly remote. We are new (<2 years old), small (7 people, growing to 9). Through Careful Industries, we use foresight and research to understand the current and future social impacts of technologies and help our clients come get a grip on difficult strategic problems careful.industries

Someone on the radio was just saying that "growing strawberries in season is very affordable" and, well, it's not for everyone.

The first cost is time. Gardening is a skill and growing food brings with it a set of tasks. You have to learn how to do it and look after the plants. Secondly - if this food is going to meaningfully contribute to your regular diet and save money on your grocery shopping - you need outdoor space.

Thirdly, if you've never done any gardening before, you need access to some kit.

I mean, sure.

https://twitter.com/scitechgovuk/status/1627975243183579138

Who... is that ... for?

I read - and can't now find - an extraordinary thread earlier by a journalist who attended the 15 minute city protest in Oxford, which led me to this. opendemocracy.net/en/oxford-15-m… It absolutely makes sense that every cultural change will be met by a range of opposing forces. Vested interests stop change all the time, but the issue here is people's vested interests are being legitimised by fictions which, let's face it, is an age-old form of manipulation

While making my coffee, some framing on ways it would be useful to think about childcare.

Firstly, it takes a village, and if you don't have a village, having the means to find and create one in your neighbourhood in the early days of parenting is priceless. Secondly, think about the whole of childhood. Focus on pre-school is welcome but nursery is where the costs are and school is not childcare - particularly not Reception, when your child and your school might look for/need/expect more support.

Quite a new old-school internet people have been talking about how slow and tentative early twitter was, and how they didn't post much or have an account for a while. I def spent at least a year not committing. And that worked well when the market was maybe 100x smaller than now The single greatest thing about Twitter is, I think, the depth, richness and extent of the networks it offers, and the big mistake was probably trying to fund that through ads.

I shared a post that said this yesterday, but just pondering it -- while Twitter feels a bit more like 10 in a box talking about Elon Musk, maybe we should counter that by all actively sharing and amplifying each others' stuff much more. Not relying on the algo but each other? I know lots of people are really worried about losing reach, so maybe for a bit we get out of our lanes and start asking others to share things more? I have to run just now but I'm going to start by boosting a couple of things I meant to share at the weekend.