#AcademicRunPlaylist - 11/27/24

Author

Ben Waber
November 27, 2024

A selfie of me on the first floor of the MIT Media Lab, with shining white, slightly reflective floors and white and glass walls shining in the light. I'm a bald, middle-aged, white man with a red beard flecked with white. I'm wearing thick black glasses, a grey turtleneck, and a grey jacket.

It was a great day to complete various MIT administrative forms, and while my kids weren't thrilled they did enjoy swinging by the Media Lab and as were were heading home I was also able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Carlos Busso on addressing robustness in multimodal machine learning at the Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-72FuYj32g&t=5s

Next was a wide-ranging talk by Ana Valdivia on the environmental footprint of AI supply chains at the Oxford Internet Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcXsSdXL7C0

Last was "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. These authors have seemingly done the impossible: upend centuries of accepted Western thought about the development of human societies and the genesis of the last three centuries of political thought. Using exceptionally thorough research, this book demonstrates how it is exceedingly likely that human societies have continually cycled through egalitarian and hierarchical regimes, sometimes even in the same year, and how the exact configuration a society found itself in is by no means a deterministic function of societal scale or complexity. Beyond that, they convincingly shred earlier dogma around the sudden appearance of agriculture, showing how small scale seasonal gardens (like we have today) existed and even outcompeted larger scale agricultural practices. Finally, through rigorous archival work they make a strong case for enlightenment thought originating in the indigenous people of North America rather than Europe.

All of this is accomplished with an accessible and engaging style that deftly disarms criticisms by turning them against themselves with straightforward logic. The result is nothing short of a revolutionary treatise on human society and what we are capable of when political possibilities are more open. Highly recommend https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything/