> And what about dance music? Isn’t that entirely gridified? No. Not by the definition being used by the Musical Form Institute.
>
> What!?
>
> The next essay will cover dance music.
>
> To recap: gridification is not playing to a timing reference. It is correcting human performances to a fixed grid after the fact.
I felt that the essay acknowledged differences in production between genres. Tempo is used as the main example, but they also mention vocal tuning as an example of gridification.
I am glad it has, and I think that recognizing the affordable access to welfare, goods, and food has been a valuable gain.
Call me a problem person, but I would say the tech companies you are referring too are perpetrating significant harm, but maybe you do not directly experience this. As an exercise I can use terms that we normally restrict to governments.
Google controls arguably the worlds most advancement propaganda system^1 ever created, has monopolistic control over information access worldwide^2, has farreaching influence on academic research^3456 and can perform censorship on major communication and education sites without overshight or juridicial control^7. They are a dictatorship with liberal capitalism as their ideology.
A world controlled by these businesses may have been beneficial for you so far, but they systematically disempower us. By yielding power and influence to them, we lose the ability to decide how we wish live and how we shape the systems around us.
I get the arguments like Google has more money than many countries GDP's and that they are one of the most used services on the internet. But I think unlike governments, they won it fair and square, not by forcibly imposing it on the populace with guns like governments do but by people naturally liking their services. I do like liberal capitalism and I think its one of the best systems of government, but I completely get the point about needing more diversification. I would argue it is also good for Google itself that alternatives exist. Otherwise Google itself might get stuck in an unrecoverable rut.
But at least I would thank you that you considered the benefits I felt, the other responses were just downright discriminatory and refusing to see someone could honestly feel their life improved by big tech.
I like the approach that the writer takes, emphasizing the importance of humanistic experience into technology. Language will be the deciding factor for what technology becomes, and on this point I have some critique of the language that the author uses.
> Become the most flexible, underscore-shaped mind you can cultivate, the best-prepared proto-diplomat and translator of cultures, the family philosopher (because you no longer need someone to fix your printer).
In previous sentences, but here explicitely, the language used reflects that of the AI labs themselves. We do not need to find a metric to reduce our human experience to. We will not address systematic issues by pushing ourselves to become perfect. We need to start talking to our friends and families and question why we use the words we use in technology.
Hmm I'm a little lost on the specifics here, if you have time to clarify. I'm guessing the gist of your critique is that we should spurn Turing and insist on never using "think", "perceive", "calculate" (compute is fine IMHO), "understand", and other anthropomorphic words for non-biological systems (we use them plenty for fauna after all, and sometimes even for flora & fungi).
But that guess is thrown for a loop by the sentence you picked, which seems to exclusively concern the reader -- i.e. a human, hopefully! Is it the "proto-diplomat" and "translator" usage, which could conceivably include being a diplomat or translator for machines? Re-reading that doesn't seem like what she's getting at, but I really am not sure.
Yes, we should reject these words as analogies for AI, because they heavily influence the understanding we form of these systems. (The Language Labyrinth: Constructive Critique on the Terminology Used in the AI Discourse by Rainer Rehak is a great read, although quite academic).
My critique in this case was more on how a essay focussing on language uses language that heavily incorporates the values at the core of these companies (efficiency, measurable improvement, transhumanism, individualism). We should investigate the language that have created the circumstances of these companies and how these companies have affected our language.
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to?
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
If it was the government telling a platform to block certain speech, that would be a restriction in free speech.
The difference is that the ownership of HN has their OWN freedom to choose who they let post on here, and what they let be posted.
This is known as the 'Freedom of Association': The right to come together with other people to collectively express, promote, or pursue their common interest. This right also includes the right to accept or decline membership in the group for whatever reason they want. HN can choose to only allow whatever they choose on their site.
In the United States, this right is actually established (according to court rulings) by the same First Amendment that establishes the right to free speech.
The right to free speech does not require a private individual or company give you a platform to make your speech.
If I have a public platform and refuse to sponsor/publish/platform your speech, that is my free speech right! You don't have the right to force me to speak your words. Only the government is prohibited (by 1st amendment) from censoring/limiting speech (that does not cause or promote violence or injury to others). There are also some restrictions and protections also offered to the press (eg libel and defamation) and common carriers, along with the abomination of the DMCA.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
I don't think absolute free speech exists; there are always some limits to speech. Ideally not too many, but there are kinds of speech that I don't think you have any choice but to restrict if you want to have any kind of decent, safe and free society: threats, libel/slander, blackmail, and hate speech. Those are the kind of things that will silence, mislead or manipulate others, and are therefore by themselves a threat to free speech.
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
I think this depends on how you define 'hate speech'. Is talking about how billionaires are the scum of the earth hate speech?
I get the idea behind banning hate speech, but it gets really tricky when you try to think how to define and enforce it. Everyone agrees you need to be able to criticize groups that you don't like, so what makes it cross the line to hate speech (besides calls to violence, which would fall under the 'threats' category anyway)?
The worry is always that if you carve out an exception to free speech to protect vulnerable groups from harassment, how do you stop a future government from expanding those groups to include their political allies?
I think calls to violence usually only count as threat when they're targeted at a specific person. To me, hate speech is about creating an unsafe, threatening or oppressive situation for a vulnerable demographic group. Like saying a specific ethic group is a threat to society, or general attacks against women in general. Thing that, when repeated enough, will normalise the idea of violence or oppression against that group.
But what about similar speech against powerful groups, like billionaires? Well, they're not vulnerable or marginalised, they already have a disproportionally large voice, so they're not easily silenced. And of course being a billionaire is a choice; they can abdicate from their wealth in a way people can't do from their gender or ethnic group. So it's not the same. That said, calls for violence against them might still count as hate speech or be considered specific enough to count as threats.
There is obviously some fuzziness, but there also is with other limits to free speech, and there are courts to ultimately adjudicate that.
I agree with you that it isn't the same, and vulnerability matters.
My worry is that I can easily see an administration like the current US one claiming that MAGA Americans are the most vulnerable in the country, and they need to be protected.
Perhaps, but they don't seem to believe in free speech anyway. They're actively going after media that criticise the government, and are restricting government-funded scientists from using specific words that suggest research that doesn't fit their narrative.
>I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right?
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
I am personally concerned by what defensive can mean. Alignment of these models is inherently a non-neutral proces, and currently what values are reinforced is decided by a few OpenAI engineers. I feel that any 'defensive model' will further ingrain current values and actively resist the natural progression of our society. This is especially the case for any use of these models for policing or military.
Maybe people are rightfully concerned about the capabilities of the models of other (non/less democratic) states. But if we are concentrating power in the hands of few and at the same time allowing the creation of a weapon that thwarts any offense, how do we ensure the health of our democratic societies?
