#cultural-capital — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cultural-capital, aggregated by home.social.
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https://www.alojapan.com/1448451/starmer-lands-in-tokyo-but-asia-trip-makes-little-difference-to-uk-priorities/ Starmer lands in Tokyo – but Asia trip makes little difference to UK priorities #China #CulturalCapital #ITVNews #JapaneseCounterpart #news #RosamundPike #RoyalShakespeareCompany #TheNationalTheatre #ThePrimeMinister #Tokyo #TokyoNews #東京 #東京都 The prime minister is ending his trip by travelling home via Tokyo where he’s holding talks with his Japanese counterpart. Before he left Shanghai, he appeared alongside actor Rosamund Pike to hig
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The second digital divide which LLMs are opening up
This piece from Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark captures my mounting concern about the second digital divide which LLMs are opening up i.e. the skills and capacities to use these systems effectively rather than the simple fact of access to them:
Now, getting AI systems to do useful stuff for you is as simple as asking for it – and you don’t even need to be that precise. Often, I find myself prompting Claude like I’d prompt an incredibly high-context, patient, impossible-to-offend colleague – in other words, I’m blunt, short, and speak in a lot of shorthand. And Claude responds to my asks basically perfectly.
You might think this is a good thing. Certainly, it’s very useful. But beneath all of this I have a sense of lurking horror – AI systems have got so useful that the thing that will set humans apart from one another is not specific hard-won skills for utilizing AI systems, but rather just having a high level of curiosity and agency.
In other words, in the era where these AI systems are true ‘everything machines’, people will out-compete one another by being increasingly bold and agentic (pun intended!) in how they use these systems, rather than in developing specific technical skills to interface with the systems.
We should all intuitively understand that none of this will be fair. Curiosity and the mindset of being curious and trying a lot of stuff is neither evenly distributed or generally nurtured. Therefore, I’m coming around to the idea that one of the greatest risks lying ahead of us will be the social disruptions that arrive when the new winners of the AI revolution are made – and the winners will be those people who have exercised a whole bunch of curiosity with the AI systems available to them.
https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-397-deepseek-means-ai-proliferation
What he fails to grasp here is the role of cultural capital alongside this “high level of curiosity and agency”, as well as the working conditions which make its exercise possible. I’ve spent the last 20 years as a blogger learning to write in a quasi-automatic way which means I can pour out thousands of spontaneous words a day without even feeling like I’m making an effort. It’s not only the quantity of what I write, but the quality of it as well – not in the sense that it’s good (most of it is stream of consciousness) but in the manner in which I express inchoate thoughts through a highly technical vocabulary that crosses multiple domains. Through actual training (philosophy, sociology), professional experience (education), reading (media/comms) and hubris (STS, political economy) I can cos-play across disciplines so naturally that I rarely notice myself doing it, at least on the blog. The combination of these two traits, the capacity to write lots near effortlessly and to mix and match specialised vocabularies while doing so, gives me a tremendous advantage in prompting contemporary models. This complicates Clark’s judgement here:
I talk to Claude every day. Increasingly, I find my ability to benefit from Claude is mostly limited by my own imagination rather than specific technical skills (Claude will write that code, if asked), familiarity with things that touch on what I need to do (Claude will explain those to me). The only hard limit is me – I need to ‘want’ something and be willing to be curious in seeing how much the AI can help me in doing that.
Today, everyone on the planet with an internet connection can freely converse with an incredibly knowledgable, patient teacher who will help them in anything they can articulate and – where the ask is digital – will even produce the code to help them do even more complicated things. Ensuring we increase the number of people on the planet who are able to take advantage of this bounty feels like a supremely important thing. If we get this right, everyone will be able to achieve more and exercise more of their own agency over their own intellectual world. If we get it wrong, we’re going to be dealing with inequality on steroids – a small caste of people will be getting a vast amount done, aided by ghostly superintelligences that work on their behalf, while a larger set of people watch the success of others and ask ‘why not me?’.
https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-397-deepseek-means-ai-proliferationCasCa
The point Casey Newton makes here about DeepSeek exposing chain of thought as a design decision is relevant as well. To the extent the model is explaining its ‘reasoning’ (what it thinks you want, what it will do in a response) in a way intended to support the user in maximising the effectiveness of their use, the more reflexivity in the user will be rewarded with a greater capacity to get functionality out of the model.
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I hesitate to use the term ‘prompt engineering’ because it carries a lot of baggage. It suggests this is a precise skill constituting a form of expertise, lending itself to being framed as the basis for a new occupation for the 21st century. There’s a lot of similarity between the ‘prompt engineering’ discourse and how ‘data scientists’ were talked about in the early 2010s. Conversational agents will now do this precise work for you in an unsettlingly effective way:
Instead I think we should frame prompting as an expression of cultural capital. Much as the capacity to manipulate symbols in socially valued ways can help you ‘get on’ in organisations, it can help you get on with conversational agents. These systems are fundamentally rewarding articulacy in a way parallel to other arenas where articulacy is rewarded. To be able to explain your intentions, provide a plan of action and share goals enables you to use conversational agents effectively.
My experience is that the literacy which I’ve developed as a long-term blogger is exceptionally powerful for using conversational agents effectively. I’ve had 20 years of practice of taking vague intuitions or ideas and quickly explicating them in a long form way, which enables me to easily deploy conversational agents in a range of ways which would be much more difficult and/or time consuming without this literacy.
This helps us unpack what Ethan Mollick somewhat underwhelmingly describes as a ‘natural gift’ on loc 2474 of his book Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI:
While, as we discussed in the last chapter, prompt crafting is unlikely to be useful for most people, that doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. It may be that working with AI is itself a form of expertise. It is possible that some people are just really good at it. They can adopt Cyborg practices better than others and have a natural (or learned) gift for working with LLM systems. For them, AI is a huge blessing that changes their place in work and society. Other people may get a small gain from these systems, but these new kings and queens of AI get orders of magnitude improvements. If this scenario is true, they would be the new stars of our AI age and would be sought out by every company and institution, the way other top performers are recruited today.
Please sociologists don’t neglect this terrain because you find generative AI creepy and hype-ridden! Clearly it is both, but we have a lot to contribute here.
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/17/prompt-engineering-is-an-expression-of-cultural-capital/
#conversationalAgents #culturalCapital #ethanMollick #generativeAI #prompting
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I hesitate to use the term ‘prompt engineering’ because it carries a lot of baggage. It suggests this is a precise skill constituting a form of expertise, lending itself to being framed as the basis for a new occupation for the 21st century. There’s a lot of similarity between the ‘prompt engineering’ discourse and how ‘data scientists’ were talked about in the early 2010s. Conversational agents will now do this precise work for you in an unsettlingly effective way:
Instead I think we should frame prompting as an expression of cultural capital. Much as the capacity to manipulate symbols in socially valued ways can help you ‘get on’ in organisations, it can help you get on with conversational agents. These systems are fundamentally rewarding articulacy in a way parallel to other arenas where articulacy is rewarded. To be able to explain your intentions, provide a plan of action and share goals enables you to use conversational agents effectively.
My experience is that the literacy which I’ve developed as a long-term blogger is exceptionally powerful for using conversational agents effectively. I’ve had 20 years of practice of taking vague intuitions or ideas and quickly explicating them in a long form way, which enables me to easily deploy conversational agents in a range of ways which would be much more difficult and/or time consuming without this literacy.
This helps us unpack what Ethan Mollick somewhat underwhelmingly describes as a ‘natural gift’ on loc 2474 of his book Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI:
While, as we discussed in the last chapter, prompt crafting is unlikely to be useful for most people, that doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. It may be that working with AI is itself a form of expertise. It is possible that some people are just really good at it. They can adopt Cyborg practices better than others and have a natural (or learned) gift for working with LLM systems. For them, AI is a huge blessing that changes their place in work and society. Other people may get a small gain from these systems, but these new kings and queens of AI get orders of magnitude improvements. If this scenario is true, they would be the new stars of our AI age and would be sought out by every company and institution, the way other top performers are recruited today.
Please sociologists don’t neglect this terrain because you find generative AI creepy and hype-ridden! Clearly it is both, but we have a lot to contribute here.
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/17/prompt-engineering-is-an-expression-of-cultural-capital/
#conversationalAgents #culturalCapital #ethanMollick #generativeAI #prompting
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“The [South African] White elite use culture in 3 different ways to defend their interests and identity:
first, they use #storytelling to shape the dominant cultural narratives in a society;
second, they value #CulturalCapital in the process of the racial integration of elite organizations…; and
third, they adopt the political strategies and language of #marginalized communities to neutralize their effect in undoing White power and privilege”
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“The [South African] White elite use culture in 3 different ways to defend their interests and identity:
first, they use #storytelling to shape the dominant cultural narratives in a society;
second, they value #CulturalCapital in the process of the racial integration of elite organizations…; and
third, they adopt the political strategies and language of #marginalized communities to neutralize their effect in undoing White power and privilege”
