Joice Tang

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on the atlas — 144

highlights — 1923

Many became persuaded that merely studying society – coming to understand how things work – had transformative implications. Rather than seeing themselves as importing politics into sociology, they saw the study of society as inherently political. Specifically, they came to believe that existing structures of inequality and domination were grounded in a mistaken view of how society functions (or the conditions that must be satisfied in order for society to function), and so substituting for that a correct view would tend to undermine those structures (and would be opposed by those who benefit …
Why do sociologists think that they are critical theorists?
The fact that words from the past can feel so applicable to our reality doesn’t mean those writers were fortune-tellers, speaking “ahead of their time” as if by magic: it means that the problems faced by people decades and centuries before us were not always so different from our own, and that if we look closely, we might be able to place ourselves within a historical struggle. We can reminisce about a time before TikTok, iPhones, or MeToo as a way out of our current problems, but we are likely to be disappointed: it is those conditions, after all, that brought us to these ones.
The perpetual present-tense - by rayne fisher-quann
Prestige is a brain worm, and its shape changes all the time. Keep your identity small, and don’t fear starting over. The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next.
The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun
A year into this experiment, no one can tell how it will end. Will these graduates be ahead of the curve in the new A.I. economy, or robbed of a chance to hone their critical thinking skills? If adopting A.I. eases their entry into the work force, might it also hinder their intellectual development in unforeseen ways?
California’s Public Universities Went All in on A.I. Now They’re Tearing Themselves Apart. - The New York Times
In early August, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed education agreements with Nvidia, Adobe, Google, IBM and Microsoft; each company agreed to provide free A.I. resources to California schools. The goal is to create the “A.I. work force of the future” by training high school, community college and C.S.U. students to use the technology.
California’s Public Universities Went All in on A.I. Now They’re Tearing Themselves Apart. - The New York Times
Nowhere is it written that science must occur only on college campuses or in the halls of academic medicine. Science happens in barbershops and living rooms, in basements and farmer’s fields. The wisdom we produce as a community is what knits the enterprise together — not the overhead rates, not the agency letterheads, and certainly not the approval of any particular administration. Practically, this means diversifying beyond federal grants through licensing, philanthropy, and local partnerships. It means mutual-aid networks among scientists, especially the early-career researchers the system …
The ivory tower era of science is over | STAT
It is true that Chinese respondents in some surveys likely have some genuine enthusiasm — particularly many who lived through and benefited from the market transformation of the 1990s, for whom technology has been a story of concrete improvement. However, enthusiasm and fear are not mutually exclusive. A person can genuinely believe some AI products are beneficial and feel they have no real choice but to adopt it; can welcome a technology because it seems useful while worried that not mastering the usefulness renders themselves obsolete.
China’s AI optimism isn’t what it seems - by Zilan Qian
The desire to access the transformative benefits of technology is inseparable from the fear of being left behind.
China’s AI optimism isn’t what it seems - by Zilan Qian
This history offers a new perspective on the “AI enthusiasm” we are now seeing in China. Many are correct to point out that the enthusiasm arises from the top-down state discourse portraying technology as a redemption against the history of the “century of humiliation,” as well as people’s ground-up experience of benefits from rapid technology development in the past few decades. Technology is good because it makes the nation stronger.
China’s AI optimism isn’t what it seems - by Zilan Qian
On any given day, I am not just dealing with the phone, notifications, or the urge to doomscroll. It’s more personal than that. When I notice myself getting distracted, I know I’m being pulled away from my journey and my mission. I don’t care about screentime. I care whether, at the end of the day, I feel like I honored or betrayed the story I am trying to live.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
The point of having a personal myth is in having an internal structure that supports you as you navigate this overwhelming world. The point is in having all of your inner resources united and channeled in the same direction. The point is in feeling like you’re standing on firm ground even when the whole world is shaking.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
Life has always been inherently psychologically demanding. Humans have always used myths to deal with the complexity and ambiguity of life. But life is more psychologically demanding today than at any point in human history. Meaning, we need myths now more than ever.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
The reality is that the vast majority of religious people are living essentially secular lives. Let’s consider a more concrete example of this. It is highly likely that your guiding values differ from some of your neighbors’ or colleagues’ values. Well, that would be inconceivable in societies of the past where everyone shared the same guiding myth.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
In “lobotomized pigeon,” I discussed how our attention problem wasn’t created by smartphones. It’s an age-old problem of human potential, and it’s “just” been made more complex by modern technology.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
However, focus isn’t a productivity tool. A more focused life is, above all, a more meaningful, engaging, and fulfilling one. Productivity is a consequence of living this way, not the central aim.
You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth
If you don’t own equity here (or more importantly, work at one of those companies and have access to shares regular people can only dream about) your participation in the AI boom is entirely through the lens of: is this thing going to destroy my life?
Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? - by kyla scanlon
Imas says that the “relational sector”, which is “human-intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service” will become increasingly important. But that requires firms to think about jobs in a way that is more than a cost metric, which they don’t tend to do.
Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? - by kyla scanlon
Firms are also craving some humanness. Gillian Tett at the Financial Times wrote that firms are focusing on “critical thinking” skills and are looking towards hiring students that majored in the humanities rather than STEM. Much of this is due to “shallowness” of the ideas of STEM students. So the big question now — for financiers, regulators and educators alike — is how to create skilled AI natives who can also use the critical thinking needed to spot both the opportunities and (very real) risks in AI.
Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? - by kyla scanlon
Those seem to be the pillars of strength in the AI age: being able to evaluate, having some element of taste, holding accountability, building out networks, and the capacity to deliver a human touch in an increasingly automated world.
Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? - by kyla scanlon
“because grading and planning and communicating inform the work. They are the work.”
The EdTech Backlash Is Here, and It's Just Getting Started
Beguiled by buzzwords, Kate Brody says we’ve abandoned the challenging classroom experiences that build perseverance and yield deep learning: “Like, ‘Oh they don’t need to read, they could listen to audiobooks. They don’t need to write, they could use voice-to-text.’” She elaborates: There’s a form of care with kids that looks like you’re being hard on them, but it’s respecting their dignity. They’re not going to feel a sense of purpose unless you allow them to struggle and get strong and do hard things.
The EdTech Backlash Is Here, and It's Just Getting Started
“They sold it as something that customizes to your kids. Really?” Sandra Martinez Roe, Sunny’s mom, told Jacobin. “That’s what a teacher is for.” Meanwhile, as LAUSD signed onto an expansive number of pricey no-bid tech contracts, the district’s human educators felt increasingly squeezed. While Sunny was in second grade, teachers and support personnel walked out for three days over unsustainable conditions like bare-bones staffing and poverty wages for hourly workers. And last month, the two unions (United Teachers Los Angeles [UTLA] and Service Employees International Union Local 99) felt com…
The EdTech Backlash Is Here, and It's Just Getting Started
I-Ready has lately come under fire for a long list of problems, including a lack of evidence that it works and a federal lawsuit claiming that its private equity–backed parent company bypassed consent to harvest and transmit students’ personal data. But for Sunny, the main problem was a mind-numbing boredom. Paper-and-pencil test prep can feel boring, too, but there students can quickly check the right answer and move on. I-Ready, however, blocks users from clicking on anything until they sit through the slow audio question and accompanying animation — baking in the assumption, as one parent n…
The EdTech Backlash Is Here, and It's Just Getting Started
I would be happy to make concessions and cut deals to save the universities at the expense of the community of “true learners” currently stifled in rather unpropitious conditions. For one, I do not believe in an educational Eden. In 1936, Robert Hutchins lamented that: “This is the position of the higher learning in America. The universities are dependent on the people. The people love money and think that education is a way of getting it. They think too that democracy means that every child should be permitted to acquire the educational insignia that will be helpful in making money. They do n…
The Great Zombification - by Owen Yingling - The New Critic
Under this framework, there is little to do but wait: the university system will soon fall apart, and then something new can be built from its ashes. There is little good in the university today: it is a brand, a hollowed-out signifier that has long since lost its referent. Its demise, then, would do nothing more than deliver us from our confusion when we unconsciously substitute their immense worth a hundred years ago for their value today.
The Great Zombification - by Owen Yingling - The New Critic
But this framework, when applied to such elite schools as are advocating its adoption, is a contradiction in terms. If the best use of AI is “cheapening” education (removing work from professors by generating essay feedback, examinations, course material, etc.) — in sum automating and standardizing “teaching” — why would it make any sense for the “best” schools, which claim to spare no expense on education, to turn to it? It’s a bit like if haute cuisine restaurants decided to replace their entrees with Soylent because it was “new and innovative.” Goethe once noted, “A teacher who can arouse a…
The Great Zombification - by Owen Yingling - The New Critic
In this world, the more you offload the areas you cannot cultivate sufficient care for, the better you will perform. So the best universities are not teaching students to be wise, to be a banker or consultant, to be an “indoctrinated” leftist academic, or to be a rich elitist prick. The best universities preach the efficiency, convenience, and countless other benefits of chaining one’s intellect to a very charming machine.
The Great Zombification - by Owen Yingling - The New Critic
There is arguably no greater threat to higher education than the devaluing of teaching and learning…. Many universities and colleges have turned to underpaid adjunct instructors and contingent workers to teach their classes while hiring full time benefit-level administrative staff to manage other aspects of campus life. Tenure-track faculty are often told that their highest priority should be their research, not their teaching. Colleges and universities cannot expect the public to trust or value the classroom if they do not fully value it themselves.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
And they liked that I took the time to invite them to lunch. When I was a graduating senior, my thesis advisor, Aaron Friedberg, took me out to lunch with his colleague and friend, Andrew Moravcsik. I doubt either of them remember it, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of my time in college. It probably set me down the path I’m currently on.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
I’ve come to realize that my value as a professor is not that I know facts about the Chinese political system, it’s that I can organize and humanize those facts. I can model enthusiasm for a subject and humility about what I don’t know. I can get something wrong. I can provide a note of praise or perspective when it’s needed. I’ve set foot in Zhongnanhai in Beijing and the headquarters of the Chinese Democracy Party in Queens. I know what it’s like to bumble through a Chinese character quiz on a hungover Friday morning, or to teach a Chinese kid from Hunan how to pronounce the word “mouth.” I …
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
Third, professors need to focus on our comparative advantage over the LLMs. If we conceptualize our jobs as simply repositories and transmitters of knowledge, as I did when I had just started teaching, then we are already obsolete.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
Second, now should be a moment where we consider whether some of the academic labor we conduct makes sense.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
As an example, my students pointed to our university’s Honor Code as woefully ill-equipped for the moment. Among other things, the Honor Code requires all students to commit to not cheating, and to report on other students if they believe a violation has occurred.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
At the end of the semester, I always have group lunches with as many students as I can. It’s nice to get to know them outside the classroom and hear about their experiences.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
Beyond facilitating academic integrity violations, AI threatens universities in a way that is much deeper. To put it bluntly, AI is demoralizing. That’s how I’ve experienced it, at least.
Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum
The most likely outcomes are protectionism that cripples the technology, populist regimes that crack down on AI development entirely, a politics of resentment that makes any kind of constructive policy impossible, and the kind of social fracture that took deindustrialized regions a generation to recover from, if they ever did.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
The transition partly is the destination, because the political and social forms that emerge from it will determine what kind of post-AI society we actually inhabit.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
Retraining policy, in its actual historical record across deindustrialization, has been one of the worst-performing categories of labor market intervention.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
If you flooded the trades with displaced lawyers and consultants, and scores of ambitious 18 year olds who no longer see college as a safe choice, two things would happen. First, the credentialing bottleneck would absorb some of them slowly; right now these sectors have a dearth of trainers. And to the extent it didn’t, and the training was able to scale, then wages in the trades would collapse from oversupply. The trades cannot function as a mass-market sponge for cognitive displacement. They’re a high-quality option for some individuals, not a structural answer for an entire economy.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
Either the check is too small to actually replace lost income, in which case the political fury of the displaced is undiminished, or the check is large enough to replace it, in which case you’ve gutted the incentive to perform the essential work the economy still requires. There is no version of universal income transfer that solves this without enormous wage inflation in essential sectors, which has its own cascading consequences.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
We discovered, in real time, that an enormous share of the work that actually keeps society functioning has to be done in person, by humans, often for modest pay. Something I have been thinking a lot about is how Reality 2 completely inverts this. The “safe” jobs during COVID are now the riskiest to AI, and vice versa. Many of the jobs least exposed to AI in the near term are the essential ones we depend on. Which means the displacement, at least at first, may be concentrated among the people whose labor is, in a narrow economic and societal sense, most substitutable, while the labor we cannot…
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
Here’s what I think is much more likely, and much sooner. It isn’t a “job apocalypse” that destroys every job in the economy. Instead, it is a hard, messy period of concentrated pain with job losses clustered in specific, desirable jobs.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
They are also a window into what I’ve come to think of as the “messy middle”: the long, hard stretch of job disruption between today’s mostly intact labor market and the post-AGI world of abundance that Silicon Valley keeps promising is just around the corner. It is the period we are entering now, and almost no one is planning for it — and that Silicon Valley largely skips over.
The "Messy Middle" - by Molly Kinder
The magic and the privilege of higher education is what happens when you put people in a room and ask them to take a hard question seriously together. It is people sitting at a table, thinking out loud, disagreeing in good faith, changing each other’s minds a little. The refuser learns from the embracer what the tool can actually do; the embracer learns from the refuser the actual costs of using it. Neither of those conversations happens on a laptop alone at midnight. We should be having them across a seminar table.
The Students Who Won’t Use AI - by Chris Wells
Labor’s saving grace may be the fact that most jobs are much less automatable than software, the only job that most AI researchers have ever had.
Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
Just because something is scarce and high-status doesn’t mean that everyone will be able to afford it; in fact, many people won’t. So we may end up in a world where most people work has handmaidens to the super-rich, while they themselves settle for cheap digital alternatives.
Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
The top 1% can’t consume as much as a large middle class, and redistribution would be necessary to keep consumption going. China today is a useful analogue: income inequality limits household spending, which then constrains the size of the services economy.
Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
Put another way: “Augmentation vs. automation” is real, but it is a product of the firm/social context, not of the technology itself. I don’t believe that OpenAI can or will restrict how their customers use their AI products to “augmentative” uses only. Regardless of Altman’s stated intentions, people are going to hire fewer copywriters and junior devs as a result of ChatGPT and Codex. That is not a decision that OpenAI gets to make.
Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
Second, because of this competitive environment, most Chinese desk workers instead focus on how they can leverage AI mastery to outcompete peers. Some call this “techno-optimism,” but I think it’s closer to techno-determinist pragmatism: everyone assumes AI is here to stay, so individuals should wield ChatGPT/OpenClaw/Doubao2 to avoid falling behind. Playing conscientious objector would only disadvantage your own prospects.
Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
So why isn’t China experiencing the same level of panic about AI and jobs? First, as mentioned above, Chinese workers have faced cutthroat job competition and rampant economic anxiety well before AI hit the scene. When I told my 24-year-old cousin that American new grads felt like they couldn’t find jobs because of AI, he scoffed and said: “In China, we can’t find jobs because there are too many people.”
Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun