#solutionism ? #climateChaos ?

Confronted with the problem of potentially apocalyptic flu strains being created by the hellish, disease-amplifying practices of factory chicken farming, agricultural science steps up and …

… tweaks the chickens a bit.

#science #scicomm #solutionism #biotechnology #pandemic #food #farming #influenza #apocalypse #bettertodiethanstopeatingcheapmeat

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/science/bird-flu-chickens-crispr.html

#VerticalFarming Does not Save Space

"If the #electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar panels, the energy production takes up at least as much space as the vertical farm saves. "

the only #solutionism that exists.. is to #sinkTheRich

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/02/vertical-farming-does-not-save-space/

"I called this solutionism, but “digital neoliberalism” would be just as fitting. This worldview reframes social problems in light of for-profit technological solutions. As a result, concerns that belong in the public domain are reimagined as entrepreneurial opportunities in the marketplace."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/opinion/artificial-intelligence-danger.html

Having seen James C. Scott's seminal "Seeing like a State" getting referenced several times this past week, I'm now going through some of my old bookmarks related to the book. It struck me how well the below recipe also summarizes Silicon Valley's attitude & culture of naive #solutionism

"Here's the recipe:

1. Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
2. Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
3. Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
4. Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
5. Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
6. Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
7. Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly"

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/

Also (somewhat conflating other aspects in here), the evolution of the SV-owned Social Web of the past 18 years seems currently somewhere between steps 6 and 7, for better or worse...

Scott Aaronson says (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823) #OpenAI is 'working on a system for countering #cheating by…subtly tweaking the specific choice of words...in a way that wouldn’t be noticeable to a reader, but would be statistically predictable to anyone looking for signs of machine-generated text.’

Curious to learn if
@timnitGebru or @emilymbender appreciate Aaronson’s description of #Ethical #AI.
I pretty much dislike the talk: #Solutionism & #Utopism Galore

source:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/31/ai-assisted-plagiarism-chatgpt-bot-says-it-has-an-answer-for-that