An astonishing photograph from the Very Large Telescope this week of a planet being born. From the link:
At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk— the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric ringsmark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk — the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
Downhill mountain biking is huge here on the south coast of British Columbia. As a young rider for years my son built trails and maintained a few here on Bowen Island. His mentor and inspiration was our neighbour Dangerous Dan Cowan, an absolute legend of North Shore style trail building who built unreal structures here. The history of mountain bike trail development is a folk tradition here. Mountain Life lifts the cover on some that hidden history.
In this ongoing story about Alberta schools banning books, the Alberta premier today had this response to the list prepared by the Edmonton School Board:
“Edmonton Public is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Smith said during an unrelated news conference. If they need us to hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate … we will more than happily work with them to work through their list, one by one, so we can be super clear about what it is we’re trying to do,” Smith said.
The term is “malicious compliance” and it is an excellent tactic. It will be good to see exactly how the premier wants her party’s bigotry expressed in public schools. Here’s the ministerial order, which makes pretty steamy reading on its own.
A wake up call for Tottenham this morning. After a season start with two clean sheets, we met a determined Bournemouth side who brought their high pressing game to North London. After they scored an early goal they kept on going and put Spurs into a slow, defensive, and reactionary torpor. It wasn’t until 77’ that Spurs found some life. Still, some slow decisions and poor passing compromised our ability to take advantage of Bournemouth’s fatigue. We only managed one shot on target, five overall. The Cherries saw out the match with grit and determination and raw belief ,holding on for the win. They played out of this world.
Now that Pierre Poilievre is back in the public eye, it’s worth pointing out why his particular brand of populist politics will never make him a good prime minister.
There was recently a case in Canada in which a man has been charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon for defending himself from a home intruder. Predictably, this stirred Poilievre into a broad-based attack on the justice system as a whole and he is now vowing to introduce a private member’s bill that would broaden the conditions for using self-defense, including killing someone if someone enters your home without permission.
This is a populist tactic. You take an extreme case that is an outlier to the general application of the law, and you call the system broken and promise to “fix” it with a bill that would outlaw that very specific case without any consideration to the other consequences of the law, or to whether the law actually works at all.
In Canada self-defence is permitted by law, but under specific conditions. If the police think you have broken those conditions, you will be charged. It is then up to a judge to hear the case. But it is already legal to kill someone in self-defence. People have been acquitted in the past for even killing police officers who were either undercover, or who were acting illegally. So what Poilievre is advocating for is actually legal now, although I doubt that he is intending that this bill should result in more police deaths. That is certainly not the country I want to live in.
But that is the problem with pandering. You miss (or in this case just ignore) the nuances of cases and you can end up creating the conditions that make the world less safe and less secure, including for the people who support you and for whom you are claiming to champion, all to appear “stronger.”
When you are in opposition, you can do and say whatever you want, because you don’t have the power to make actual changes. A populist will always jump on the outrage train because stoking fear and providing simplistic solutions to problems, even before a court has ruled on the legality of a situation, gets you “points.” in some cases, it might even end up getting you elected, and then you have to govern. And you cannot govern that way. Populists make terrible governments, as we are seeing all around North America at the moment.
A more reasonable opposition leader might say “this case has the potential to erode the rights of Canadians to defend themselves. Let’s see how the trial goes and if we don’t like the result we will propose amendments to the Criminal Code that allow for more latitude in self-defence, but that provide reasonable safeguards for people like delivery drivers, police, paramedics, firefighters, canvassers, and social workers, who by the nature of their jobs, find themselves more likely to be in these situations where they are on the receiving end of self-defence.” That might be a position I would disagree with, because I’m not sure the law needs more latitude, but it is one I would be able to discuss. But how are citizens supposed to reason with a reactionary position based on a single unique case which may well be complicated by a number of mitigating factors? We cannot make laws like that, and Poilievre’s gamesmanship is not designed for deliberation. It is what I call “a drive by shouting” which is when a politician makes bold and brash statements with no regard for consequences simply to trigger emotional responses based in anger, fear, and perceived grievance. It forces a categorical response. And that erodes democratic process.
Poilievre is not a reasonable opposition leader, and his return to politics through his recent by-election has just reminded me why so many people refused to elect his party to govern the country back in the spring. Since returning to Parliament, many in his own party have advised him to change his tone. Many others, including me, are skeptical that he will be capable of that. Many are watching. We need a good opposition leader in Canada right now, even if that leader is the leader of the Conservative Party. Poilievre isn’t it.
Congrats to the Air Canada Components of CUPE who secured a contract between Air Canada and their flight attendants. This was a wild moment in Canadian labour relations. A ten year agreement expired, the union demanded pay for unpaid work and achieved a 99% strike vote. Air Canada preemptively locked out the workers last weekend and began cancelling flights. The federal government ordered the groups to binding arbitration and then ordered the flight attendants back to work. They refused and began an illegal strike. The public largely stayed onside becasue NO ONE LIKES DOING WORK FOR FREE. Then yesterday, the announcement came that the dispute was settled.
This whirlwind week was an important moment for labour in Canada. At the same time as the new agreement was announced, CBC reported last night on the increasing prices of things, especially food, and how the affordability crisis is going. We have heard all kinds of news about price inflation over the past few years, but hardly anyone has talked about wage stagnation. In the past, price would rise, and so would wages. But in the last 20 years, and the last ten years specifically, this difference has become truly unhinged. Nobody in politics with any power, least of all the federal Liberals and Conservatives, have discussed wage increases, but everyone seems to have solutions for inflation, which has largely returned to its “normal” levels.
We need to talk about wages. All the time. You are not getting paid enough. People need to be paid more. And if you are worried about prices increasing perhaps we shouldn’t be because very little of what we are paying in higher prices is going to the people that make things and provide us with the services we need. For things like food, living wages for workers are not the issue. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but we’re still living the neoliberal dream, so at the very least, the lateral thinking needed to do it is wanting.
Chris Mowles has a lovely post on the perils of an unquestioned commitment to directionality in complexity. Our work is never starting from scratch, and what does “going forward” even mean in a non-linear context?
…maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?
Rosa Zubazarreta has long been a curious “pracademic” – as she calls herself – about facilitation and deliberation. We have met a few times in the past, but I consider her a close colleague in the work of constantly trying to learn about how to host conversations and design group spaces in which dialogue and listening is maximized. She recently had a peer-reviewed article published called “Listening Across Differences” about deliberative “mini-publics” which are small democratic fora hosted in Austria. Her most recent blog post explores the role of AI in group facilitation, a topic about which she is deeply passionate, and about which I am very curious.
It’s happening and I’m certainly willing to explore it more in deliberative contexts. I have run a couple of small experiments using AI to summarize vast amounts of narrative information and advice submitted by citizens to create high level summaries of advice, high level articulations of dissenting opinions and so on. This becomes material for further deliberation. I have been toying with a design where members of a group all spend time feeding information to different GPTs, querying the data in different ways and bringing their insights to a conversation. It’s about how to make vast amounts of opinion accessible, and generate a learning conversation that everyone can participate in.
This is becoming an interesting field and I notice the twin poles of curiosity and resistance in myself. My friend Jeff Aitken sent along a link to Metarelational.ai which feels like a true TRIP to explore. There are several varieties of trained chatbot there. I have seen and explored some of these, each one cultivated like a garden, each one designed to do something a bit different. Honestly, after a hour or so in a session with these tools, it’s hard to know what terms like “relational” mean. I am firmly in the world of knowing and working with human-to-human relationality. The work at Metarelational seems to at times to evokes a kind of eschatology of human relationships stemming from our own design, and a sort of surrender to AI and machine intelligence that feels religious. It uses religious and spiritual terms and language like “agape” and “right relationship” and “interbeing.” I joked with Jeff the other day about when a new religion might sprout up around an AI chatbot. It’s a joke, but given the proclivity for human beings to seek a higher intelligence that has all the answers, and to be led in a course of action “forward” at any costs, I think there is a serious question here.
I’m not sure that this shows up in the training set
About 8 years ago I remember Dave Snowden coming to Vancouver directly from a conference of security experts where they were discussing the top existential threats to humanity. In ascending order, at that time, they were: nuclear war, climate change and AI. At the time I remember thinking that how strange that seemed given that climate change is an absolute certainty and at least with nuclear war, we could actively try to prevent it. I had no idea what AI could really look like.
Nevertheless this particularly dystopian view of things had me on alert as I watched for signs that this might be happening. I am no AI expert, and the only AI I regularly and consciously interact with is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is now the best search engine out there, as everything else has become ruined by algorithms. It works, but it is also highly flawed and there is a simple reason for that: It acts like a human being.
If you’ve used ChatGPT you will be familiar with its major flaws which include approval seeking, hallucinations and, an overinflated sense of its own abilities. It will often say it can do things – like a harmonic analysis of a jazz tune – that it cannot actually do. And when it does the work and confidently provides the user with absolute garbage, my instinct is, that if it was an employee, I’d fire it. The inability to say “that is beyond my current limitations” is maddening. I was asking for this musical analysis the other day and after it couldn’t provide it, I discussed the fact that there is a price to this misplaced confidence. ChatGPT uses a tremendous amount of energy and water, and when it does so to just waste my time, I explained, there is an ethical issue here. It acknowledged that issue but it didn’t really seemed bothered by it.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because it was trained on the documented behaviours of certain classes of humans, for whom performative ethics is the norm. We do almost everything here in the global north with a detached knowledge that our ways of life are unsustainable and deeply and negatively impactful on our environment and other people but we don’t seem particularly bothered by that, nor to we display any real urgency to do anything about it.
This training is why Yuval Noah Harari is so worried in this video. AI is unlike any other tool that humans have invented in that it has agency to act and create on its own. As Harari says, printing presses cannot write their own books. But AI can, and it can choose what to write about and what not to, and it can print them and distribute them too.
The issue, and we have seen this recently with Grok, is that AI has been trained on the detritus that humans have left scattered around on the Internet. It has been raised on all the ways that we show up online. And although it has also been trained on great works of literature and the best of human thought, even though most of that material appears to have been stolen, Harari also points out that the quantity of information in the world means that only a very, very tiny proportion of it is true.
When I watched the video and then reflected on the post I wrote yesterday about difficult conversations, I had the insight that AI will know all about the stupid online conversation I started, but will know nothing about the face-to-face conversation that I later had. Harari points out, very importantly, that AI doesn’t understand trust. The reason for that, he says, is that we haven’t figured out the trust and cooperation problem in human society. That’s the one we should be solving first.
AI has no way of knowing that when there are crises in a community, human beings often behave in very beautiful ways. Folks that are at each other’s throats online will be in each other’s lives in a deeply meaningful way, raising money, rebuilding things, looking after important details. There is no way that AI can witness these acts of human kindness or care at the scale with which it also processes the information record we have left online. It sees the way we treat each other in social media settings and can only surmise that human life is about that. It has no other information that proves otherwise.*
For me, this is why face-to-face work is critically important. Meetings are just not the same over zoom. We cannot generate the levels of trust on zoom that we can by spending a significant amount of time in physical proximity to one another. Face-to-face encounters develop contexts of meaning – what I have called dialogic containers – and it is in those spaces and times that we develop community, trust, friendship, sustainable commitment and, dare I say, peace. The qualities of living that we ascribe to the highest aspirations for human community are only generated in their fullness in person. They require us to work through the messiness of shared life-spaces, the conflict of values and ideas and paths forward, the disagreements and confusions, by creating multiple ways in which we encounter and relate to one another. Sustainable community life requires us to see one another in multiple identities so that we discover that there are multiple possibilities for our relationships, multiple ways we can work around blockages and unresolvable conflict.
We are fast losing this capability as human beings. When people ask me to work with their groups there is always the lingering question of whether we can do the work of three days in two, and the work of two days in one. The answer is no. We can do different work in limited times and spaces. Narrowing the constraints on the act of making meaning together creates more transactional relationships based on incresingly incomplete and inaccurate information. This is world we are showing to AI agents. The actual human world is also relational, multi-faceted, subtle and soaked with meaning. As we feed our robots a particular picture of ourselves it’s possible that we are also becoming that very picture. Depth of relationship and meaning becomes replaced with a smeared, shallow breadth of connections and transactions.
There is no better way – no faster way, even – to develop trust than to be together. I think this is so true that it certainly is axiomatic to my practice and how I live my life. And if trust is the critical “resource” we need as human beings, to not only live well but to also address the existential threats that we face – which are all entirely created from our own lack of trust – then being together face-to-face working, playing, singing, struggling, discussing, and figuring stuff out is the most radical act of hope and generosity we can make, to ourselves and to our descendants.
I suppose there will always be a top three list of threats to human existence, but it would be nice if those top three were things like “sun goes supernova” or “super volcano blankets the earth in decades of darkness” and not actions for which we are entirely responsible.
* It also occurs to me that alien cultures who are able to pick up and understand the electronic signals we have been radiating towards every planet within 100 light years of ours will also get a very particular picture of who we are as a civilization. Never mind what was on the Voyageur record. Monday’s TV news has already overtaken it.