January 2024 AI Ethics Round-up
Starting 2024 off right with a few solid resources to level up our AI, tech and governance literacy.
Welcome friends, to 2024! The first month of the year has flown by, and I can’t believe we’re already staring February in the face. It’s gearing up to be a wild year for AI and AI ethics, with regulation popping up, new AI capabilities, pre-emptive downsizing by some names in BigTech, and mounds of misunderstanding about how all of this works. Let’s not forget that our friends at Substack have decided to be our very own as-it-happens case study on whether we can skew amoral principles as moral and totally we should totally just ignore how much money they are making over their amoral positioning.
It’s going to be a wild one friends.
I’ve been commenting on a friend of mine’s LinkedIn posts. He’s the CEO of a successful marketing company and probably one of the smartest people I have ever met. He recently started talking a lot about AI, and I’ve found myself commenting, much to his chagrin I’m sure, about how his posts contribute to the general misunderstanding of AI writ large. He never responds to me, but I don’t really expect him to either. But it got me thinking about how little most people understand about AI and its capabilities, and how people are making decisions and reacting not based on what AI can actually do, but rather what the hype-machine says it can do.
So, this month’s round-up is all about leveling our understanding of AI, ethics, and corporate governance. Check out some of the best things I read this month below.
You are going to hear a lot about Digital Literacy in 2024. Culturally, we've been dropping the ball the last few decades on digital literacy - helping people understand key concepts about the technology they interact with every day. But there's been a real push lately to not make the same mistakes with AI -- and to help people understand what AI is is not, and what it can and cannot do. I really enjoyed
's of list of literacy resources for not just AI, but data as well because it shows the breadth of the understanding we need to engage intentionally with AI.
I've followed
on LinkedIn for quite a while. She always has brilliant insight and great commentary. When I stumbled across her Substack, I knew I had to share. She shares key pieces of her work and others. This is definitely a Substack to keep an eye on.
Generative AI, for all its overblown hype, will be a huge part of our future. But, what if we had to stop using it? What would the world without GenAI look like going forward? We've spent so much time talking about the existential threats to humanity, what about the existential threats to genAI, and what might the post-GenAI world look like? That's the question that
at tries to answer in his article, "What happens when a court cuts down ChatGPT?" I found the new perspective interesting because we talk so much about the future of humanity with AI, what's the future of humanity without AI?
You all remember OpenAI, right? The company ousted their uncontrollable CEO Sam Altman, and the resulting drama saw Altman hired by Microsoft, dropping them and heading back to OpenAI while replacing the board members who were ousted with sycophants. A big part of that drama was the way that openAI was structured to help it stay ethical, but I wasn't especially clear about how that all worked.
's Substack, tackles the corporate governance structure for only OpenAI, but also Anthropic and xAI. It is a fascinating read, that really helped me understand these governance structures and how they are supposed to curb our worst, greediest tendencies.
What other resources do you have to level up your understanding of Tech and AI? Let me know in the comments
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Thank you for the shout-out!