Last gasp: The Sunday night reader for 4/25/21
'A cancerous little phrase,' AI, and Rumaan Alam
Low-Skill Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be Fixed
Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic: “It is a cancerous little phrase, low-skill…
The problem lies not with American workers, but with American jobs and American policy infrastructure. Too many jobs pay too little. They’re too dangerous. They offer too few benefits. They offer no union representation. They are inaccessible to millions of Americans who are pushed out of the labor market by illness, disability, poverty, the arrival of young children, or discrimination. ” Read more.
George W. Bush and his paintings
This one’s by me: “I can be angry about and fight against the results of his past actions. But I can't grudge him using his platform to try to undo some of that. I don't hear repentance from him, but I'll take trying to move the needle where he can. Silence would be worse, no matter how badly I don't want to see his face or hear his voice.” Read more.
She’s taking Jeff Bezos to task
Kara Swisher talks to computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini. It’s a great primer on AI, facial-recognition, bias, and big tech’s role: “If it’s understood what we’re moving them to do is to, quote unquote, ‘improve the technology,’ we’re nonetheless helping powerful actors develop powerful tools that can be used as tools of oppression, right? Tools of social control. With the Amazon situation, we saw after the murder of George Floyd, right, that IBM, then Microsoft and Amazon, pulled back from selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement in different capacities. And I think that response of not even selling the technology, right, is another approach. The answer isn’t always, let’s go collect more data and optimize tools of oppression.” Listen here.
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Leave the World Behind
I finished Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” this week. A family Airbnb vacation goes weird, then the whole world goes wrong. It’s uncanny and uneasy throughout. But also a comedy of manners? Tricky business that Alam deftly pulls off. Each character exposes the different ways we act like everything is OK, realize we can’t anymore, and continue to try to anyway — except for the 12 year old, who is able to bend like a sapling. “She was only a girl, but the world still held something, and that mattered.” This profile of Alam is good, but you should read the book too.
Say it plain…
