Stephen Downes

You can read Bonnie Stewart's report on belonging and place here though I actually preferred this blog post. I share less of a sense of belonging to place - though I now live near where I grew up, Ottawa and eastern Ontario are aswirl with change. Still - this holds: "belonging is relations. It is always relational, tied to relations of connection, relations of power, relations of place." I came back to eastern Ontario because of family, and have no desire to leave, because for me there is nothing like a dirt road cutting through a forest or corn field.

I still use Firefox and have no desire to change (though of course if I started seeing advertsing on it I'd be looking for an alternative in less than a minute). Firefox is a great product, says Liam proven in this article, but its management is terrible. "Is there a way to encourage Mozilla to be an organized, focused, professional business, with eyes keenly set on a clearly defined goal? Perhaps that's the wrong question. Perhaps that shouldn't be the goal at all."

The gist: "It's part of a trend known as 'fake-fluencing.' That's when companies create fake personas with AI in order to make it look like a real person is endorsing a product or service. The company in this case is Nexa, an AI firm that develops software that other companies can use to recruit new hires. Some of the videos feature Nexa logos in the scene. The company's founder and CEO Divy Nayyar calls that a 'subconscious placement' of advertising." Now let me be super-clear about this: The fact that AI is used to create the content (instead of using real actors who lie, as has traditionally been the case) means nothing more than that it's cheaper, and more companies can do it. The problem is the fake content advertisers have been running fake content since advertsing began (at least, that's what nine out of ten dentists say) that it's transparently racist, another entry in a history of racist tropes being used in advertising over the years. 

This is a short report with a link to the conference and a video. "While the Fediverse promises a radical departure from walled-garden platforms, participants agreed that privacy and consent need to be an important part of Fediverse infrastructure, both at the technical layer and the governance layer." I can sort of agree with this, with some caveats. Related: this introductory article from Dock on Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).

Helen Beetham ticks her argument against artificial intelligence up a notch. "What if, at at least in its current, (de)generative, hyper-capitalistic guise, the project of AI is actively inimical to the values of learning, teaching and scholarship, as well as to human flourishing on a finite planet?" This, of course, is a complex question: hyper-capitalism could well be actively inimical to human values while AI itself could be neutral. There's no necessary connection between the two. Anyhow, Beetham expands on three major arguments to this end, with the promise of more: that AI does not tell the truth, it does not reason or explain, and that it does not develop expertise. 

My own inclinations on the subject are twofold: first, that academic freedom ought to apply to everybody, not just university professors; and second, having academic freedom doesn't create an obligation on someone else to pay for it. So universities, say, can't complain academic freedom is being infringed when governments are willing to fund science but not arts (there are other arguments; academic freedom just isn't one of them). Having said that, the strongest part of the argument offered in this article appears near the end where author Jean-François Venne cites Louis-Philippe Lampron arguing that "Academic freedom is institutional in nature, like freedom of the press." In other words, academic freedom is "about the autonomy and independence of the institutions themselves: their freedom from interference by governments, funding bodies and pressure groups." So are universities like the CBC? That's a pretty interesting question.