Jack Henderson

@RadxChange

[RadicalxChange @RadxChange]

The case for data dignity is no longer coming only from advocates and academics. It's coming from inside the labs.

In Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action in the Northern District of California, a 2021 internal memo from Anthropic was unsealed as an exhibit.

In it, CEO @DarioAmodei lays out a framework for compensating the people whose data trains AI models.

[Decentral Park @decentralparkny]

Join us for our next Decentral Park meetup in collaboration with RadicalxChange, happening next Wednesday, Feb 18 (7–10 PM). RadicalxChange will walk us through their 2023 Harlem participatory budgeting pilot using online Quadratic Voting

RSVP: https://t.co/00jaNNYNQJ

[ᴍᴀᴛᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴡɪᴛᴛ @m_t_prewitt]

Some insights from conversations I've had about the "Progress Paradox" piece. (Linked below.)

Consider GDP. We know that increases in GDP do not prove by themselves that society is doing well. GDP just shows activity, which can indicate either health or suffering. A GDP boost from good weather is good -- more people buying ice cream. But a GDP boost from bad weather is bad -- more people fixing damaged roofs.

When societies equate GDP growth with flourishing, they create incentives to build leaky roofs and foul the weather. Thus, there's no substitute for qualitative distinctions between "good" and "bad" economic activity.

Technological progress is just like that. Sometimes, rapid movement in technology indicates that ideas are flowing, and people are solving real problems together. Other times, "progress" indicates only that people are scrambling to seize negative-sum opportunities to exploit the public or acquire abusable power.

A flourishing society should never encourage the latter. In a fairly obvious way, it's just not a good thing -- it's like ordering up rain to boost GDP. Yet, we do it. We reward technological change with private, unaccountable, long-term monopoly power. This tilts the whole field of technological endeavor toward the wrong kind of progress, the wrong kind of change, and not least, the wrong kind technology...technology that doesn't really address human problems, but pulls people into media vortices that empower the technology's owners.

As with GDP, "technological progress" is much too broad a target. We need to be able to distinguish the good kind from the bad kind.

https://t.co/BOapDIYZvr

[RadicalxChange @RadxChange]

🎙️NEW POD: FIXING BUGS IN DEMOCRACY

What if democracy worked more like open-source software?

@jessaroo speaks with @takahiroanno, an AI engineer and sci-fi writer who just won a seat in Japan's parliament. https://t.co/bTvN4Uoql4

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.

[RadicalxChange @RadxChange]

Next Friday, on Nov 14 we'll be gathering for Learning with Ukraine 🇺🇦, a global conversation on democratic resilience & frontline innovation:
👉 https://t.co/y4Mmz0YW0k

Why? Because even in the darkest of times, Ukraine is showing the world what 21st-century democracy can look like. Watch @jessaroo dive into this remarkable story with @maxsemenchuk of @Web3InstituteUA.

Full RadicalxChange(s) episode:
📺YouTube | https://t.co/2wCYqlyZXR
🎧 Spotify | https://t.co/bryQokHvO4
 Apple | https://t.co/QaMPtSmlx8

[(((E. Glen Weyl/衛谷倫))) ⿻ 🇺🇸/🇩🇪/🇹🇼 @glenweyl]

I couldn't be more thrilled to announced that @jessaroo will be joining @RadxChange as its new Executive Director. I met thousands of people around the world as we traveled for the @pluralitybook, yet no one impressed me as much as @jessaroo.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Glen did a great job of making arguments backed up by empirical evidence.

Curtis tried to do the same, but imo his examples were more distant and so less effective. There's big differences between the peacetime political, wartime political and corporate settings that make examples from one scenario difficult to translate to the others (namely, the type of goal of the entity and the selection function that produces them). A little too close to "concentration is efficient, it's why bees huddle together in nests and why we have cities and yimbyism, therefore it's contradictory to oppose concentration camps as a tool of government"

Glen did a good job of pointing out "you want X? Well let me tell you about actually-existing X in our current society". The critique that these examples don't count because they are a byproduct of our democratic status quo strikes me as weak; all political systems everywhere are born in a pool of inconvenient slop, your thing has to be robust to that.

Curtis was at his strongest when critiquing the status quo. The argument that NYT depends on gov info leaks which can be viewed as a (decisive) unfair subsidy was novel, at least to me, and it's compelling. Democratic politics does need to have a more honest account of the role of elites; "they're all a bug in the system" is not it, and "they're there and if you don't trust them you're a bad conspiracy theorist and a danger to public health" is also not it.

Glen's closing speech was amazing, though I think to a skeptic "I agree the US isn't a democracy, but I think we should actually become one" would not be convincing without specific compelling ideas for how that would happen. I would love to see Glen continue to flesh that out in more detail, perhaps more object-level than Plurality (eg. "how would my system decide how to solve urban crime and execute on the solution?")

[(((E. Glen Weyl/衛谷倫))) ⿻ 🇺🇸/🇩🇪/🇹🇼 @glenweyl]

Less than 3 months after forming a new party and with essentially no electoral history, @team_mirai_jp has achieved something with essentially no precedent in Japanese history, winning a seat in the Upper House of Japan's parliament.

[RadicalxChange @RadxChange]

Calling all New Yorkers! RxC NYC is hosting a casual screening of Good Enough Ancestor on the Lower East Side tomorrow, Wednesday 3/19 at 7pm. Swing by! https://t.co/3fbD6rjeja

[RadicalxChange @RadxChange]

Good Enough Ancestor is out now!! Learn the story of Audrey Tang as she reflects on democracy in Taiwan and around the globe. Watch the full short documentary at RxC's Combinations Mag: https://t.co/rlFcldam2v @audreyt @CombinationsMag

[Decentralization Research Center @TheDRC_]

Here's a weekly roundup of three must-read articles in the field of decentralization: ⬇️

1. @ICalzada, Géza Németh, and @0malradhi examine how decentralized Web3 mechanisms, specifically those based on blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and data cooperatives, can establish robust detection techniques fostering trust in GenAI.

https://t.co/xyWY26yVB5

2. Broad Listening

@jackhendersn introduces us to the concept of broad listening in this @CombinationsMag piece on how Japan and Taiwan are leading the way in using AI and other digital systems to aid the democratic process.

https://t.co/qbosT5UV6P

3. Listen: Cooperative Data

Matt Martensen talks about a cooperative model that could reshape digital ownership: a user-owned web browser that decentralizes power and profits winto the hands of the people who use it.

https://t.co/iHTnshR5z1

[Combinations @CombinationsMag]

To revitalize democracy in the age of AI, we must pivot from one-way broadcasting to dynamic broad listening. Innovators like @takahiroanno and @audreyt are leading the way.

https://t.co/E2y28xTWd2

[RadicalxChange @RadxChange]

Join us in Berlin on Wednesday, Jan 15, 2025, to explore how we can support workers in an AI-transformed world at🌍 New Solidarity for an AI-Disrupted Economy.

RxC co-hosts this official side event of the upcoming AI Action Summit (@Elysee) in Paris with @glob_solutions and @sciencespo, bringing together labor leaders & tech innovators to converge in Berlin (Jan 15) to design economic strategies for the AI era.

Crafting new data rights, collective bargaining models & worker empowerment.

Join the conversation shaping our post-cognitive economy by filling out the form below!

🔗 Save your spot: https://t.co/I7hdpcdnNC

[Combinations @CombinationsMag]

https://t.co/O4RAvHjxL7 is live! ✨

A publication by @RadxChange, exploring new ideas about economics, democracy, and the relationship between technology and power.

If our societies are irreversibly technological, we must steer technology itself towards the common good, rather than accept it as an instrument of self-interest.

To do that, our essays will examine institutional reconfigurations that can point to attractive futures for technologically mature societies—eschewing compounding power concentrations and opening up routes for more participatory paradigms.

Our aim is to illuminate new possible paths, spotlighting connections between ideas, technologies, and social and political organization—to find maps of the present moment that might help us navigate it.

The name Combinations reflects a belief that significant human progress often emerges at the junctures where diverse experiences and even paradoxical ideas can meet, exchange, and recombine. In this spirit, we offer our own, partial viewpoints, and seek to shed light on the work of thinkers and doers who have other perspectives. We believe that these people, ideas, and communities add up to more than the sum of their parts.

[Combinations @CombinationsMag]

We're excited to announce that this week we will be launching https://t.co/O4RAvHk5AF: a new publication by @RadxChange exploring ideas about economics, democracy, and the relationship between technology and power.

To mark the occasion, you are invited to join us here, this Thursday, November 14th at 11 am ET, for a livestreamed discussion with contributing authors @byranadasgupta and @t1ngyu3 in conversation with the Combinations team, where we’ll explore coordination and collective intelligence at two different scales: planetary politics and AI models.

See you soon! ✨

*Not on X? Here are a few other ways to connect:

👉 https://t.co/RtQxgkSrFX

👉https://t.co/NjL5hj7rHA

👉 https://t.co/JIjWDom8Av

[Collective Intelligence Project @collect_intel]

Today, we are publishing the Collective Intelligence Project whitepaper, our R&D agenda for transformative tech governance.

It is our contribution to what we see as one of the world’s biggest problems. We couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. 1/

https://t.co/J3XeAz9fVZ

[Jack Henderson @jackhendersn]

I am verifying for @verses_xyz: sig:0xa54203ea4c5d06cbd8edfdd786173e52cb241d7b9911a86f38e1383451b9ad4619922348ded1c30baec251d0a8e06a3bdf1a362ebc4a4dc3cb1a844d36c8058e1c

[Jack Henderson @jackhendersn]

@glenweyl https://t.co/ZK2ialJbMZ by my friend @AlecGewirtz

[Jack Henderson @jackhendersn]

@andy_matuschak Thoughtful thread! Wish I'd seen sooner. You may appreciate Vitalik's recent comments :)