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Rita

@julliard.bsky.social
11 followers 38 following 22 posts

Smashing together cognitive science, urbanism, economics, and tech ambivalence. Smash smash

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Reposted by Rita
Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
My heart breaks for the NSF officials who are forced to put out announcements like this. A very sad & terrifying time for all of us in science who have promoted -- and who I hope will continue to promote -- the basic principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in our work.
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
A linguistic model with a broader capacity for nuance, and is trained on and for complex customer complaints. It can find discrete pieces within a complex complaint, identify trends across multiple complaints, and identify links to operational teams or processes on the side of the service provider
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
In 2025, does web3/blockchain have a new paradigm to offer #urbanplanning? Public discourse around data privacy and ownership has certainly evolved. But what does web3 direct us to build? Or is it just another technocratic plot device?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Been thinking back to Quayside, the Sidewalk Labs #smartcity concept in Toronto. The project failed because in 2020, the threat of Big Brother and authoritarian neoliberalism proved more salient than the allure of a sustainable, techy, efficiently managed public space
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
There's so much yet to be gained for humanity via the intelligent (and dynamic) balance of centralization + decentralization
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
A smart city that isn't AR ads overlaid on streetscapes, charming timber enclaves of privilege, and autonomous car datasets. Instead, a smart city that prioritizes human enrichment, progress, and collectivism. What could a #web3 smart city look like?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
"Everyone dies eventually" and "You're just a speck in the universe" feel like normal, inoffensive truisms of lived reality. But *the entirety of human creation* being a minor statistical fluctuation in the theoretical realm as well? Well, that feels gloomier somehow
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
But the laws of thermodynamics aren't optional. Which implies that human cooperation and all the beautiful emergent complexities are just transient phenomena. A statistical glitch
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
The universe moves towards entropy, while human societies move toward organization. Specialization (at local levels) and centralization (at global levels) increase with complexity...
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
What does an economic system look like that is: - ethically robust, - humanistic, - economically efficient / responsive to societal change, and - algorithmically mediated? Or are some of these qualities mutually exclusive?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Am only just beginning to think about this - but especially in cases of corrupt governments and financial instability, would decentralized currency improve or worsen citizens' lives?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Are there any urban economists who have opined on how the proliferation of cryptocurrencies might impact cities?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
So, network states in the web3 context: I love the tenets of opt-in/out, equality of opportunity, personal freedom and responsibility, democracy. But I also can't truly, truly envision how network states meaningfully fit into a prosocial world that is good for the future of humanity
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
All this work in AI depends upon, is attenuated by, language (human or computational). So what might achieving Artificial General Intelligence look like - without language, without symbols, i.e. outside of computing? Is there a type of information/expression that does not degrade with processing?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Then again - this could describe communication with another bona fide human as well, esp in that we constantly are negotiating the Gricean maxims
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
We use symbols (characters, words, 0s & 1s) to represent concepts, then put it through many levels of processing. Then we perceive and interpret the outputs. Is this fundamentally different from numerology? Is anticipating "intelligence" another flavor of anthropomorphizing, of mystical optimism?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Is today's (deep-learning based) AI just well marketed numerology?
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Some things about human nature will remain true no matter what. Any theory of utopia that ignores these is bound to fail - human sociality - the salience of embodied existence - ingroup vs outgroup ideas of identity, safety, fairness; tendency to scapegoat - the need for diversion and to create
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
4. Nurturing knowledge economies through increasing information symmetry vs the constant incentive toward asymmetry through monopoly
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
3. The local decentralizations made possible within a centralizing entity that enjoys network effects
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
2. Commodity capitalism vs theories of freedom still based on the concept of ownership
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Interesting philosophical tensions in tech today... 1. The centralizing tendency of Big Tech vs the innovation and freedom that diversity/noise enable
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Rita @julliard.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Technical advancement fully in thrall to the logic of modern finance. (Atlantic newsletter, Matteo Wong)
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