#mandy brown

This short essay by Mandy Brown has 777 words. (I counted… OK, Microsoft Word did.) I’m lucky it was brought to my attention by one of the many newsletters I try to read each week/month. (I wish I could remember which one… ) The essay is about dealing with uncertainty. And how uncertainty is the only thing that makes life possible. Our awareness of life, of its great variety and beauty and…

But if there’s anything I know about practicing it’s that it isn’t about rules or consistency or scarcity or god forbid optimizing: it’s about coming back. A practice is built on the movement of return.

Mandy Brown on the implications of bots taking on more and more responsibilities in our digital lives:

Will Oremus approaches the coming age of AI with somewhat more circumspection. He notes, among other concerns, that language interfaces are necessarily more opaque. As an example, Oremus asked his Echo a seemingly innocuous question, “what’s a kinkajou?”, to which Alexa promptly responds: “A kinkajou is a rainforest mammal of the family Procyonidae.” But Alexa didn’t say where that information came from, nor did it provide any opportunity to interrogate the source’s credibility. After some digging, Oremus was able to uncover that Alexa was quoting the Wikipedia page. In a browser, the same question would have surfaced Wikipedia, of course, but it would have done so transparently, and it would also have located many other pages; plus the Wikipedia page itself would have included the page’s history, which might have revealed where there were disputes about the information given. Alexa’s placid, Majel Barret-esque response presumes a certainty of truth that may be fine for generic questions about kinkajous but are unlikely to hold up to many other topics.

And this excellent paragraph on gendering these bots as female: