#technoutopianism

[azspot]

Shadow’s failure suggests a potentially deadly combination of techno-utopianism and laziness. The two fuel each other: The overarching belief that software will fix everything leads to slapdash engineering, procurement and deployment.

Move Fast and Break the Iowa Caucus

[nolan-higdon]

Stop scrolling. 🛑 The tech bros are selling a future that doesn’t exist. Our latest at Gaslight Gazette strips back the "techno-utopian" paint to reveal the hollow rhetoric underneath. The future isn't a Silicon Valley slide deck. Read the full expose: https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/p/the-ai-illusion

[kk]

Fears, Hopes, and Dreams for Our Relationship with AI

AI: friend or foe? From cultural erasure to eco-utopias, we're battling the Ghost in the Algorithm. Dive into fears, hopes, and WTF moments of humanity’s future with machines. Can creativity, ethics, and humanity survive?

It was a rainy Friday in Vancouver—perfect weather for stepping into the courtroom of ideas at AI’s Ethical Dilemma: AI on Trial. Hosted at Northeastern University, this was a dynamic arena of ideas, where thinkers, creators, and visionaries converged to explore the possibilities and challenges of artificial intelligence. Polina Moshenets, Jaskirat Singh, Dean Shev, Steven ten Holder, and I—your…

Fears, Hopes, and Dreams for Our Relationship with AI

[communipuppity]

This is me, I made this :3

[azspot]

…say what you say about techno-utopianism, at least it’s an ethos.

Is This Man Dr. Evil?

[wolvensnothere]

Posting as a reminder to read later.

Yesterday on Reddit writer and author Kevin Kelly held an AMA (Ask Me Anything), answering as many questions from fans as he could muster, ranging from his viewpoint on artificial intelligence to what it means to be a Techno-Optimist in the 21st century. To top it off, he briefly goes into his first and only time taking drugs, in which case was LSD for his 50th birthday. There he claims he reluctantly witnessed “God,” who was “not soft and cuddly.” Kevin Kelly then proceeds on answering questions about his pioneering an ideal that is now commonly known as Techno-Optimism – an ideal in which we at Serious Wonder greatly adhere to. He responds by stating that his techno-optimism is based on two premises, the first of which being that newer technologies not only creates newer problems needing to be solved, but subsequently newer possibilities and options on how to address them. He notes that the very act of having new choices between good and bad is great in itself, since it’s a choice that we never had access to beforehand…

[teachglobalsoundart]

will.i.am & Britney’s “Scream and Shout” does something really musically interesting. The track features Britney: she went into a recording studio to lay down vocals specifically for this track. However, her most musically significant line—that is, what she sings that do the most structural or compositional work in the song, or what she sings at climactic moments—is a sample (or a reperformance meant to sound like a sample) from her 2007 single “Gimme More.” “Scream and Shout” clips the “it’s” from “Gimme More”’s “It’s Britney, bitch,” and cuts this in right before the track’s rather understated drops (e.g., at 1:13-14). So if the most important vocal Britney delivers is actually a sample of one of her earlier songs, why bother to “feature” her, to pay her for a custom vocal? Seems like it would be cheaper to pay for the sample than for a new performance, right? Or, if you want to feature her, why use this sample (or a reperformance that sounds exactly like it was lifted from “Gimme More”)? [...] The Britney sample is a musical analog to what Steven Shaviro calls the non-indexical character post-cinematic visual media. Conventional notions of “aura”—the idea that reproductions refer back to an original—are indexical in the same way that “cinema” is indexical. As Shaviro explains, “cinema therefore always assumes—because it always refers back to—some sort of absolute, pre-existing space” (17). The film camera records what passed before it IRL. The “Britney”-sample “does not refer back indexically to [Britney Spears’s] body as a source or model. It does not image, reflect and distort some prior, supposedly more authentic, actuality of [Spears]-as-physical presence” (18). It re-presents an already-distorted vocal recording—the referent is the recording, not Spears the person/performer. Spears’s performance in “Scream & Shout” is still indexical—it just indexes a profile—a “complex, aggregated and digitally coded electronic signal” (Shaviro, 19) rather than a subject. Or rather, it understands the subject it references as a profile and not as an “individual.” This profile can be used to generate any number of different “Britney”s.

more from Robin James at It's Her Factory

I'd kind of agree, but I'd also say the "Britney, bitch" has also become something of Spears' trademark in social media. Check out her twitter profile. Maybe the "Britney, bitch" is about Spears/will.i.am referring to a digital social networking utopia where artist and post-human sampled artist can co-exist instead of falling into the depths of litigation...