#communication labor

[pomeraniandancer]

This is something that *SUPER* worries me when it comes to intersectionality issues. I am deaf and an ADHDer, and possibly also autistic (we're waiting to see how my ADHD medication works out before evaluating me for ASD). I am also, and this is relevant, white. On multiple occasions, I have found myself in *very* difficult conversations where I missed a social or linguistic cue, and got myself into very hot water without me having any clear idea of how or what I did to land myself there. Luckily, on the times this has happened, the POC friend/acquaintance who's upset with me knows me well enough that even though they're upset with me for not catching onto what they had been saying, they also recognize that my missing the social cue or (accidentally) crossing a boundary is not a reflection on the entire me as a person.

Nevertheless, when those interactions happen (and they occur about once or twice a year), are quite emotionally traumatic and scarring, and leave me uncertain about just how stable a footing I am on with the person I accidentally clashed with.

I have seen enough rants on social media by people angry at someone they don't know, someone who crossed a serious boundary when asking about feminist theory, intersectionality, racism, etc., and when the OP gets angry with the asker, the asker tells them that they have ASD or some other similar disorder, and that they didn't understand or recognize that they were stepping on a metaphorical land mine with their question.

Inevitably, the angry person accuses the asker of using their diagnosis as an excuse, a "get out of jail free" card for their invasive, rude, or poorly reasoned questions.

Because of those reactions and accusations of using their diagnosis as an excuse, I have never once reminded the persons who have gotten angry with me that I am deaf, that deaf culture has a very different social and communication code from hearing culture, or that I also have ADHD.

On occasion, after we've given each other some space, they will come back and give me some advice about how to more successfully and correctly interpret statements or remarks they or other POC/intersectional/minority people have made. Inevitably, that guidance has demanded more social and communication effort on my end on top of what I already have to do as a deafie and an ADHDer.

At the same time, they, as a marginalized person, are also going out of their way to put more work into communicating and interacting with me as a white person who inevitably doesn't recognize all the privileges I have until they are pointed out to me.

It's as if there's a perpetual gap between me (and other people like me) and other marginalized groups, particularly POC and similarly intersectional groups. And asking either one of us to take the step to bridge that gap is unfailingly going to mean asking one or both of us to put more work and effort into communicating with each other above and beyond the work we are already putting in as a matter of course. Asking either of us to put even more work in would be a wholly unreasonable demand in any other situation where we might be interacting with someone who has the privileges that neither I nor the marginalized person I'm interacting with, have.

So that's the crux of the problem I often find myself wondering about. A white person like myself with invisible disabilities that affect their ability to read and correctly interpret social circumstances, and another marginalized person who does not have those disabilities, who has privileges that I do not, but also has challenges and barriers that I don't have. And therefore there is this seemingly unbridgeable gap in communication structures between us. How can we get two such communities to effectively and productively communicate together? I'm hesitant to suggest putting disabled POC in a mediating position unless they volunteer for it, since they by definition are battling twice the number of barriers that either I or an able-bodied POC is living with. And all of this is setting aside the fact that disabled people are rarely wholly disabled -- most of us are able-bodied in some respects, and disabled in others. This is how and why many disabled people live with internalized ableism towards some other groups of disabled peoples, without having that same sense of ableism towards others. Just because we're disabled doesn't mean that we universally recognize and understand the disabled experience in every circumstance.

So how do we bridge that gap? Surely some people have managed it successfully? Who and where are they? What can we learn from their experiences and observations to build a more comprehensive framework for bridging those gaps in situations where everyone is justified in objecting to adding more communication and emotional labor on their already heavily burdened backs?

As an autistic person, the implications of "if they really cared I wouldn't have to say it" culture are really scary. Because I want to know what hurts your feelings, what crosses your boundaries, where the line between teasing and being mean is at for you, what you need, and how to make you feel loved. And the implication that if my disability makes me unable to figure out these things through intuition alone, then I'm just not worth having around, is genuinely heartbreaking

[borgevino]

the allergy i am seeing grow up around small talk in any form is troubling to me. do you know how to make friends with people in your physical environment? it typically starts with small talk. do you want to live in community? small talk. do you want to have the type of relationship with your neighbors where you can run over and borrow a battery for your smoke detector when it starts beeping at 10pm? small talk!! do you want leeway from your coworkers when you fuck up something small? you gotta be able to build a relationship and that's small talk, baybeee.

"but i don't need friends and i don't care about community!" okay, lone ranger, what about the people in your community who need you? "but i have social anxiety!" me too, bud! we simply must soldier on. making up lists of questions to ask people helps. and people are predisposed to be generous, i've found. even if you make some kind of mistake, what is this but the natural give and take of human interaction? nobody is perfect.

you were not put on this earth to live by yourself and then die. you need people and people need you. treat those around you with curiosity and generousness of spirit and you will gain so much goodwill in return.

[maigetheplatypus57]

Do you think Evbo learned how to do those jumps and thought "oh this is so sick what's the best way I can show off my parkour skills"

[kropotkindersurprise]

October 2, 2024 - Over 1,000 Samsung workers in Chennai, India, have been on strike for four weeks, making it India’s biggest strike in recent years. The protests have disrupted production at the factory, which employs 1800 people and contributed a fifth of Samsung’s $12 billion revenue in India last year.

The striking workers are demanding recognition of their union, CITU, and a wage increase. The average salary for the Samsung workers is currently about $300 a month. [video]

[neuroticboyfriend]

once again thinking about how fucked up it is that special ed used me and other disabled children as unpaid, coerced labor. i worked enough to be making $100 a week. i was "paid" in fake money redeemable only at the school cafeteria, which i worked at, and was forced to do things that distressed me. they gave us $1 a week, if they remembered to give it to us at all.

this was while i would sometimes go the entire day without eating because i didn't have the money to buy food and the free food was not sensory safe. we also worked outside the community - grocery stores, warehouses, shoe stores security tagging items. all under the guise of job skill development, we did $100 of labor a week without ever getting paid. and we were demeaned while we did it. and we were just teens.

so no, i don't want to hear about how special education is good. not with the way me and my peers were treated and taken advantage of. death to institutionalization, in all forms.

[farfallasims]

Labor Day Weekend, Sag Harbor 🛥️

[thepeacefulgarden]

[whereserpentswalk]

There are UBI advocates who say that UBI won't make people work less. And I think if it doesn't make people work less than it isn't enough.

[joeywreck]

“the economist, a journal that speaks for british millionaires”-vladimir lenin

I think it’s safe to say today it’s the american billionaire.

[pixelglam]

Happy Labor Day from the Brownstones 🇺🇸🌊

[okboomer17]

Alexia: Labor Omnia Vincit [2022]

[thererisesaredstar]

Deungdae issue about female machinists (1964)

[simmir99]

Welcome to The Stardust Restaurant and Lounge! Here we give those reservations only, no walk-ins welcome kind of vibes. We bougie y'all! Finally sharing this build with all of you and I hope you love it as much as I do. I was going for a dark, sexy, luxurious look.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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[magnoliadale]

Ronnie Williams & Chase Adams

I just got back in town from Nashville!! A time was had, I can tell you that much haha. But of course, I was inspired to create a couple of sims that for sure would have stopped me in my tracks on Broadway

[softhumpslut]

This is probably my nichest kink but like imagine being pregnant. Imagine getting pregnant. Being bred full of cum day in and day out till it takes and then some just for good measure. Imagine being kept pregnant. You're all plump and round and soft and your tits are full of milk and you're so dumb now but it's socially acceptable coz 'pregnancy brain lol'. And you're so consistently, so insatiably horny. And sensitive. You can have a train run on your pussy, ass and mouth and that clit is still tingling.

Imagine in a fantasy world being cursed with perpetual pregnancy. You're so soft and sensitive and pliant and just easy pickings. Just being taken care of and fucked all day every day. Tits full of milk hanging low, sometimes milked like a cow in heat, sometimes in public as a show people pay to watch. Sometimes having those big soft milky tits tied up so you can't even leak and just get fuller and bigger till it hurts and you have to beg to be milked like a cow. Dumb as one too. Pussy constantly drip drip dripping. The perfect toy.