The Humane AI Pin has officially launched, with opinions widely split on whether it’s revolutionary or blah. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about MPs and WhatsApp.
A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Algorithms are deciding who gets organ transplants. Are their decisions fair? • FT
Madhumita Murgia:
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Over the past decade, predictive software has proliferated through western healthcare systems as a way to make crucial medical decisions more cost-efficient and accurate. The results haven’t always been as intended. In 2019, for example, researchers found that an algorithm used by hospitals treating up to 70 million Americans was prioritising healthier white patients over sicker black patients who needed extra medical support for chronic illnesses. Nearly 47% of black patients should have been referred for extra care, but the algorithmic bias meant that only 18% were, according to the study. The bias came from the software assigning higher risk scores to an individual with higher annual healthcare costs. Because minorities and other underserved populations make proportionally less use of healthcare, from a statistical perspective they appeared less costly — but they weren’t necessarily less sick. Similar racial biases have been found in algorithms involved in estimating heart failure risk, breast cancer diagnoses and, earlier this year, socio-economic bias was discovered in a liver allocation algorithm in use across the US.
Systematic bias in algorithms can crop up for a variety of reasons, from the quality of underlying data used to train the systems — such as the skewed data from the 2019 study — to the unequal weighting of certain variables such as age, gender or race, which can inadvertently disadvantage specific communities. It’s why those who advocate for ethical use of these models, particularly in sensitive areas such as healthcare or policing, call for human oversight of all decisions and an appeal system that allows humans (surgeons, for example) to intervene if things don’t look quite right.
In an organ allocation system, difficult choices must be made. Because there aren’t enough livers for all 700 people on the UK’s list, “transplantation remains a zero-sum game and any adjustment in allocation is simply a case of causing harm to one to help another,” wrote Raj Prasad, a surgeon at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, in the Lancet this year.
But the question Jess was looking to answer was whether her sister [who has cystic fibrosis] was being unfairly and systematically passed over by the NLOS [National Liver Offering Scheme] software, precluding her from ever receiving a liver through this method.
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(This is a free link for a limited number of readers.) A long read, but fascinating.
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What I watched Hamas do • The Line
Matt Gurney was one of a few journalists to receive a briefing at an Israeli consulate in Toronto which included footage from bodycams and other cameras of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7. Even just reading is harrowing:
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I want to end by talking about this family. I’ve left it until now on purpose. If you’d read anything about the media briefing, you’d probably read about this section of the video, because it’s probably the most viscerally shocking. It’s a dad and two young boys. The dad gets the boys into a shelter but he can’t get the door closed and he’s killed by a tossed grenade and then shot when he crumples to the ground. The boys wander out. One of them, the smaller one, is badly wounded. He seems to have lost an eye to the grenade’s shrapnel — the video is mercifully not clear enough to show that in too much detail, but he’s telling his older brother that he can’t see out of that eye. They discuss their father being dead while a Hamas terrorist stands in their kitchen, a few feet away, pilfering their fridge for a cold drink. The terrorist casually offers them some food and drink, and leaves when they decline. The boys talk to each other about how their father is dead. “It’s not a prank, he’s dead,” one says to the other. “I know, I saw,” the other agrees.
Seeing that moment was the part of Monday’s briefing that I had most feared. That’s what I was afraid would break me. I’d read all about it in basically every account of the presentation. And good God, it was awful. I had to take a break writing this part of the column to have myself a good sobbing fit because this is just about the worst thing I have ever seen.
But there was something I hadn’t read anywhere else: after their father’s killer stops raiding the fridge and leaves, the older brother grabs a bottle of water and tries to give his younger brother first aid. He tries cleaning out his bloody shrapnel wounds what what supplies he has on hand.
That is bravery. That is courage.
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The evolutionary reasons we are drawn to horror movies and haunted houses • Scientific American
Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner:
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Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges—those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in.
The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.
The monkeys were “satiating their horror,” as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom—it’s called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles.
At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.
When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it’s not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction.
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The evolutionary psychology post-justification often seems a bit Just So. Then you read a thread like this. Pray you never need to put your scary play to similar use.
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“Let me tell them goodbye before they get killed”: how eSIM cards are connecting Palestinian families • The Markup
Lam Thuy Vo:
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Farid Sami Alzaro, 27, has had little control over how and when he can communicate with his family. Alzaro lives in Cairo, and his extended family lives in Gaza.
…Alzaro had read on Instagram that people from around the world were donating and delivering eSIM cards to Palestinians. Despite the name, eSIM cards aren’t physical cards at all but pieces of software that act like traditional SIM cards, allowing people to activate a new cellular plan with phone and internet access on their existing phone. Alzaro wrote to Egyptian writer and journalist Mirna El Helbawi, who was organizing an eSIM distribution campaign, and she promptly sent him access information for an eSIM to share with his family in Gaza. His family couldn’t get it to work. When he told El Helbawi, she sent him access information for a second one.
A full day after he shared the second eSIM’s info, Alzaro’s family called. It worked.
“It was the happiest moment of my life,” Alzaro said in an Instagram message. “I talked. Also with my grandmother, who is Alzheimer’s patient, do you know what she said to me? I want to hug you until you sleep in my arms, I don’t want anything but to see you.”
El Helbawi said she has distributed more than 7,000 eSIM cards free of charge since she started her campaign on Oct. 28. Within a few hours of launch, her campaign went viral. El Helbawi said that people across Europe, Canada, the US, Australia, Mexico, and other countries sent her eSIMs. She now has more than 14,000, donated by individuals who wanted to help bring connectivity to Palestinians in Gaza.
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Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable • The Verge
David Pierce:
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Unlike a device like the Rewind Pendant, it’s not meant to be always recording, and it’s not even listening for a wake word. You’ll have to activate the device manually by tapping and dragging on the touchpad, and the Pin’s “Trust Light” blinks to let you and supposedly everyone else know it’s collecting data.
The Pin’s primary job is to connect to AI models through software the company calls AI Mic. Humane’s press release mentions both Microsoft and OpenAI, and previous reports suggested that the Pin was primarily powered by GPT-4 — Humane says that ChatGPT access is actually one of the device’s core features. Its operating system, called Cosmos, is designed to route your queries to the right tools automatically rather than asking you to download and manage apps.
What Humane is trying to do with the Pin is essentially strip away all the interface cruft from your technology. It won’t have a homescreen or lots of settings and accounts to manage; the idea is that you can just talk to or touch the Pin, say what you want to do or know, and it’ll happen automatically. Over the last year, we’ve seen a huge amount of functionality become available through a simple text command to a chatbot; Humane’s trying to build a gadget in the same spirit.
The question, then, is what this thing can actually do. Most of the features Humane mentions in its announcement today are the ones co-founder Imran Chaudhri showed off during a demo at TED earlier this year: voice-based messaging and calling; a “catch me up” feature that can summarize your email inbox; holding up food to the camera to get nutritional information; and real-time translation. Beyond that, though, it seems the device’s primary purpose is as something of a wearable LLM-powered search engine.
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A couple of years ago, “wearable LLM-powered search engine” would have been a meaningless phrase. Now at least we know what the words mean, even together.
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The real personal (AI) computer • On my Om
Om Malik is excited about the Humane AI Pin:
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What does the next step in personal computing mean? So far, we have used mobile apps to get what we want, but the next step is to just talk to the machine. Apps, at least for me, are workflows set to do specific tasks. Tidal is a “workflow” to get us music. Calm or Headspace are workflows for getting “meditation content.” In the not-too-distant future, these workflows leave the confines of an app wrapper and become executables where our natural language will act as a scripting language for the machines to create highly personalized services (or apps) and is offered to us as an experience.
In this not-too-distant future, we won’t need apps to have their wrapper. Instead, we would interface with our digital services through an invisible interface. Do I need to create a playlist in my music service when I only want it to play a certain kind of music? (By the way, that was the number one use case on Amazon’s Alexa.) Alexa, Google Home, and Siri are some technologies that have set the stage for this interaction behavior. Our kids are growing up talking to machines — for them, it will be natural to use their voice to get machines to do things.
The way I see it, the evolution of apps to “experiences” means that we are seeing the end of the line for the App Store as we know it. “It’s not about declaring app stores obsolete; it’s about moving forward because we have the capability for new ways,” Chaudhri argued. Humane’s idea is to make these workflows (aka apps in smartphone terms) available to us through its myriad interfaces — primarily voice.
And I buy this future! Why? Because I have seen the shift before.
When the iPhone launched, there wasn’t a shortage of skeptics about the notion of a touch screen as an interface. I can still remember the hue-and-cry over a virtual keyboard. Fifteen years later, no one even flinches at the obviousness of a smartphone. In a few years — voice (thanks to the AI) will be part of our digital interaction reality. It won’t be the only one, but it will be an important one.
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He thinks “The biggest challenge for Humane, and the AI Pin is privacy.” I think its biggest challenge will be selling the second 100,000 of them.
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Tumblr is reportedly on life support as its latest owner reassigns staff • Ars Technica
Kevin Purdy:
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Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is “apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr” to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon’s media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled “You win or you learn.” The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named “Bumblr”) will “switch to other divisions.” Those working in “Happiness” (Automattic’s customer support and service division) and “T&S” (trust and safety) would remain.
“We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks,” the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.
Ars has emailed Automattic to confirm the memo’s authenticity and ask for comment. One source of the memo has since deleted the post, citing the typical fatigue that comes with receiving replies from random outside commenters.
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Was a startup, launched 2007, bought by Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1bn, sold to Verizon in 2017 (including Yahoo) for $4.5bn, sold (just Tumblr) to Automattic in 2019 for less than $20m. Creator of a gazillion memes. Now, well, not a lot.
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Jezebel, the pioneering women’s site, is “suspended” by G/O Media • Nieman Journalism Lab
Laura Hazard Owen:
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“Disillusioned by the state of American women’s media, I was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create and oversee a women’s-media entity‚ in this case, a Web site,” Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel, wrote for The New Yorker on November 4. “I imagined it as one with a lot of personality, with humor, with edge. I wanted it to combine wit, smarts, and anger, providing women — many of whom had been taught to believe that ‘feminism’ was a bad word or one to be avoided — with a model of critical thinking around gender and race which felt accessible and entertaining.”
Jezebel has been up for sale for a couple of weeks. On Thursday, Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Jezebel’s parent company G/O Media, said in a memo to staff that the site had not found a buyer and that “we are making the very, very difficult decision to suspend Jezebel.”
In response to a question about why G/O Media says Jezebel is “suspended” rather than “shut down,” G/O Media head of corporate communications Mark Neschis told me in an email, “The hope is that G/O Media might still find a buyer, a partner, or enough advertiser support to bring it back fully.”
…Jezebel lived up to Holmes’s vision. By December 2007, it was receiving 10 million monthly pageviews; by June 2009, 25 million. It was parodied on 30 Rock (Liz Lemon: “It’s this really cool feminist website where women talk about how far we’ve come and which celebrities have the worst beach bodies”). “I really despise mainstream feminism,” Moe Tkacik, the site’s first features editor and one of its earliest writers, told The Guardian in 2017, but “Jezebel was part of bringing feminism into the mainstream.”
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Sic transit gloria media. Seven staff laid off. (There was a time when a news organisation dropping seven staff would have been known as “another Tuesday at The Sunday Times”.) Also cutting staff: Vice, Popsugar, The Onion, and Gizmodo. ZIRP time is over.
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Apple says it ‘expects to make’ App Store policy changes due to EU DMA • TechCrunch
Manish Singh and Natasha Lomas:
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Apple has bowed to the inevitable and said it “expects to make” App Store policy changes to comply with EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The pan-EU DMA came into application across the bloc back in May. Apple has likely been expecting for months, if not years, to be subject to the new ex ante competition regime — which was first proposed by the Commission at the end of 2020. But the language change in its filing makes it explicit policy shifts are on the way.
The iPhone-maker has updated the language pertaining to its risk factors in the fiscal year 2023 Form 10-K filing (PDF), with the revised text presenting a shift from the company’s previous position, indicating a more definitive stance on potential modifications to the App Store policies.
Apple said that future changes could also affect how the company charges developers for access to its platforms; how it manages distribution of apps outside of the App Store; and “how, and to what extent, it allows developers to communicate with consumers inside the App Store regarding alternative purchasing mechanisms.”
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Morgan Stanley reckons this means that Apple will probably begin offering third-party app stores on-device in Europe. Epic will be pleased.
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Apple dealt blow at top EU court over €14.3bn tax bill in Ireland • FT
Javier Espinoza and Jude Webber:
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Apple has been dealt a blow in its €14.3bn tax dispute with Brussels after an adviser to the EU’s top court said an earlier ruling over its business in Ireland should be shelved.
Giovanni Pitruzzella, advocate-general of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU’s highest court, said on Thursday that a landmark decision quashing the EU’s order for Apple to pay €14.3bn in back taxes to Ireland “should be set aside”.
Such opinions by advocates-general are non-binding but often influential in final judgments by the EU’s top court.
The General Court, the EU’s second-highest court, ruled in 2020 that, while it supported the EU’s right to investigate national tax arrangements, Brussels had failed to show that Apple had received an illegal economic advantage in Ireland over tax.
But Pitruzzella said the court had “committed a series of errors in law” and “failed to assess correctly the substance and consequences of certain methodological errors”. As a result, he said the court needed “to carry out a new assessment”.
An ECJ ruling is expected next year.
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That second paragraph really is mindbending. So: the EU order should be unquashed. So, he’s saying Apple should pay the back taxes (currently being held in escrow until the legal process has played out). This has been pinging back and forth since antitrust queen Margrethe Vestager decided in 2016 that Ireland was favouring Apple. Ireland, and Apple, demurred. Hence: lawyers.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 