"AI in education can be characterized by ‘critical hype’—forms of critique that implicitly accept what the hype says AI can do, and inadvertently boost the credibility of those promoting it. The risk of both forms of hype is schools assume a very powerful technology exists that they must urgently address, while remaining unaware of its very real limitations, instabilities and faults or the complex ethical problems associated with data-driven technologies in education."
"There’s a quote by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen that UX designers like repeating: 'Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.' But none of the speakers at [the conference] chose to examine the larger context of the [generative AI] tools they were encouraging us to use."
"a programming platform designed to be global, supporting all of the world's languages, but also be about the world's languages. A platform on which everyone can create, with whatever abilities they have, to share interactive content that anyone can experience. For youth and young adults who want to express themselves through interactive words, emojis, and typography, playfully and artfully. Not with the goal of getting power for themselves, but to create a computational world that recognize the incredible strength and necessity of our beautiful differences."
"Fully remote work combined with regular and easily-accessible video-conferencing mimics much of the hub-and-spoke workspace design. In some cases ways it works even better. Video conferences can handle arbitrarily small or large groups of participants without any conference room conflicts. For those of us with other needs — with ADHD, anxiety disorders, hearing or vision loss, or mobility issues — we are more free to create the kinds of workspaces we need without impinging on other people’s work styles or space.
A brightly-lit but cramped office space, again with long desks but pushed close together."
"When a decision making apparatus is non-human and your system's POSIWID function is to extract and dehumanize and murder for profit and power, let's call that what it is: humans with power deciding to harm the world, with some extra steps."
too many good quotes from this, among them: "[T]here are no labor shortcuts for caring, in and of itself, no stretching a little bit of intentionality to provide focused attention across some ever increasing population. Care doesn’t scale; cruelty does. You can’t automate your way around the infinite obligation to the other."
a few data points from a report that is hidden behind a form asking you to donate your e-mail address to a sales department; mostly anecdotes otherwise
"I have a deep-seated fear... that the Black struggle will... just be about narrow Black interest.... I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide.... I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned."
"The tech industry was never perfect. It never lived up to its lofty ambitions. But it has gotten demonstrably worse. And I think the fork-in-the-road moment was when the industry stopped trying to celebrate old-school hackers like Aaron Swartz and started working full-time to build monuments to Sam Altman instead."