Amy was just a little bit older than me, and receiving this postcard from the daughter of the president of the United States in our mailbox in a tiny town in the middle of an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean shifted my view of the world and my place in it.

I became interested in civics, student government, and public service, which ultimately shaped many aspects of my life and worldview. I'm certain I'm not the only little girl who was so positively impacted by these postcards from Amy, which she signed with a little drawing of her cat, Misty.

Many years later, as an adult, I discovered this photo of Amy and her father in the Carter archives. I had it printed and sent it away to be signed by President Carter. A couple of months later, it came back to me signed. It hangs on the wall of my office, reminding me of the roots of the better angels of my nature.

On this National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, I thank the Carter family for their service to humanity and for nurturing the same sense of duty in me.

A different kind of concert experience

My partner and I went to a very different kind of concert for our shared birthday: James Blake's "Piano Tour" in San Francisco.

The show, to be held at an unspecified venue within 15 minutes of San Francisco, was organized through bside. Bside connects independent venues and artists to the fans that support them.

I got early access to tickets by being a James Blake subscriber on Vault.fm for $5/month. Vault.fm enables artists to drop music on their own terms and lets fans subscribe to access drops, which, in James' case, are songs released without a traditional music label.

James drops music via Vault.fm at least once a week, letting subscribers know via text message.

I also heard about the early access tickets via text message.

He chats with his community of subscribers in an earnest group chat in the Vault.fm mobile app. He shows up so authentically with short messages that share thoughts and info at meaningful moments.

The show venue wasn't revealed until two days before the show. During the show, James said Ticketmaster controls 80% of venues, so finding a venue through bside can be a challenge. And yet, The Warfield came through.

The "Piano Show" was James as a vulnerable, authentic, and inspired artist, and it was true to its namename: It was just James, a piano, and a few machines. He said he wanted to show us what it is like when he is creating and writing music. He performed powerful sound experiments, talked with the audience, demonstrated how he creates effects, and started/stopped songs when the machinery didn't work as expected.

As he demoed creating a loop, it captured sounds from the audience. As the loop played throughout the song, we heard ourselves as co-creators in the music we love.

Someone called out a request. I'm paraphrasing, but cheekily James said, “If you know anything about me, you know that I never do requests. In fact, now I’ll never do that song again.” And then proceeded to play the song. He paused to say, “I’m not playing this because you asked for it. It was next on the setlist,” which was met with uproarious laughter.

Isn't this what artistic creation and fan connections are about?

For a brief moment during the show, James talked about the music industry issues we face today as artists and fans:

In a Mar 2024 interview with Variety, he said:

Music is my life’s purpose, and I will not have mine destroyed by a bunch of labels and tech companies who don’t even pay us and exploit us relentlessly... I’m extremely lucky I got in before streaming took over and before all these shady deals were made behind our backs.

As a poet, this resonates. Which artist longs to put their "life's purpose" through the funhouse mirror of middleman monopolies? Which artist wants to distance themselves and profit incommensurately from the people who love what they create?

Inspired by James' quest, I did a bit more research about these issues, Vault.fm, and Bside and realized that a project I work on, XMTP, an open, secure, private, and decentralized communication protocol, might actually have a role to play in the quest.

Vault.fm was cofounded by David Greenstein, who also cofounded Sound.xyz. Sound.xyz is built with the Sound Protocol, "a permissionless, open source, modular smart contract framework for efficient creation of digital collectibles by musicians, artists, and creators."

Here are Greenstein's thoughts on how Sound.xyz and Vault.fm are meant to work together:

David Greenstein (🎧,🎧) is shipping!

@dgreenstein1

We built two tools for artists:

1. @soundxyz_ - A music marketplace.
2. @vaultdotfm - A platform for artists to directly reach their fans, without relying on social algorithms or paid advertising

Here’s an update on where Sound is, and why we’re building Vault.

175

7:57 AM • Oct 1, 2024

Alongside Vault.fm, Sound.xyz, and the Sound Protocol, how might XMTP help enable authentic, equitable, secure, and direct connections between artists and fans?

A large part of the Vault.fm app experience is a group chat between fans and the artist. This group chat could benefit from being built with XMTP, bringing Vault.fm's messaging features onchain and aligning with Sound.xyz’s vision of empowering artists through blockchain technology.

Group chat between artist and fans, built with XMTP would provide a secure and private chat platform that enhances artist-fan engagement while ensuring the ownership of communication data for both the artist and the fan.

Currently, Vault.fm does not provide the option to create your own groups or 1-to-1 chats with other subscribers, so people create groups on other platforms to coordinate meetups, for example. XMTP could be used to expand chat functionality in Vault.fm while also providing the security and privacy guarantees of Messaging Layer Security (MLS) and verifiable identities.

Additionally, because the Sound Protocol and XMTP are both open and interoperable, the possibilities for composing fundamentally unique, meaningful, and safe experiences for artists and fans are endless.

What might we build together?

Bonus: Streaming Royalty Calculator

On a related note, you might be interested in learning about the Living Wage for Musicians Act of 2024, which aims to help ensure that artists and musicians can build sustainable careers in the digital age. I found the Streaming Royalty Calculator on the page particularly interesting.

Sponsored by Representatives Rashida Tlaib (MI) and Jamaal Bowman (NY) and backed by United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), the bill is built to pay artists a minimum penny per stream, an amount calculated specifically to provide a working-class artist a living wage from streaming.

I had $4 saved up and was looking through the bargain basement cassette tapes at the new drugstore in town.

I remember the store's grand opening, which drew the salt-of-the-earth townspeople with free soda, hotdogs, and balloons. These were balloons filled with helium, not just plain air, and attached by string, not long, thin, white plastic sticks meant to create the illusion of floating.

In the store's bargain bin, I found Hunky Dory, an album released by Bowie in 1971. It was 1983, and the cassette was $1.99. I bought it. I listened. I thought, "This is terrible. I can't believe I wasted my savings on this."

In actuality, I was afraid of the music.

But I kept listening, and my assessment changed from "terrible" to "strange." The music came from a place I didn't understand. It made me feel new things. It gave me the intuition that life could be more interesting than a free balloon.

Before I knew it, Hunky Dory was the best thing ever. When I eventually received Let's Dance for my birthday, I loved it immediately. However, in the 40 years since then, I've listened to Hunky Dory many, many, more times.

Retrospectively, Hunky Dory has been critically acclaimed as one of Bowie's best works and features on several lists of the greatest albums of all time. Within the context of his career, it is considered to be the album where 'Bowie starts to become Bowie', definitively discovering his voice and style. --

The album did the same for me.

I even know the scientific explanation for Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos, but I resisted the help.

Then I saw this tweet. It resonated so deeply and only galvanized my resistance! ✊

Halli

@iamharaldur

The future was supposed to free up our time from work so we could spend it on higher pursuits.

Instead we created AI that makes art while we work.

35.1K

8:34 AM • Apr 11, 2023

But then, things went into overdrive at the tech startup I work at. I struggled to keep up with the content reviews people requested from me while also struggling to write and review my own content.

I broke down, started using Grammarly, and never looked back. I have the VSCode plugin and Chrome extension installed. 🦾🤖 I’m ready for anything!

I don’t use Grammarly to generate my writing, but I do use it to check my writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, passive voice, tone, etc.), which I believe doesn’t require a novel human touch to handle low-hanging fruit.

For rule-based, routine, or repetitive tasks like this, I’ve granted myself permission to give away my Legos to AI. This has freed me up to spend more time writing content that does require a novel human touch.

This doesn’t mean I don’t use AI to write content at work. I use ChatGPT to generate routine content. I also use it when I can’t nail the best phrasing and need to get unstuck. I can’t resist editing what it gives me, but it does a fantastic job of getting the words flowing. Finding a way to enter a topic and get a first draft down is often the most unproductive use of my time, especially when writing routine content.

If you’ve worked in tech in the last decade, you’ve likely encountered the concept of giving away your Legos to new teammates as a way to enable teams to scale.

I’ve decided to welcome AI as a new teammate and give it all the Legos I can.

Are there any AI tools you’ve given Legos to? How did it go?

Erik Voorhees

@ErikVoorhees

I asked Venice.ai the following question... just kinda trolling it on a lazy afternoon. It's response is below.

Do you find the response compelling? And if so, could you, as a human writer, do better?

147

9:15 AM • Jul 10, 2024

A few additional thoughts:

• As a technical writer at a startup, AI has no prior art to ingest until our team completes our research and writing and publishes clear and accurate docs tailored to our audience. Once the docs are delivered and ingested, the novel human work is now available for others to learn from and share via a multitude of platforms, including AI.

• As a poet, AI doesn’t have a place in generating my work. However, through Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s brilliant COMPUTATIONAL POETRY workshop, I learned how to use code and AI as sources of true randomness that enable me to break free from my well-worn poetic patterns. Even when I consciously work to destroy my patterns, I inevitably create new ones.

I attended with a focus on learning more about what technologists are doing in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Personally, I’m interested in A.I. and how it applies to my work as an Information Architect and how chatbots and content recommendation engines can help my users more easily and naturally find what they are looking for. I’m interested in IoT as it applies to my newbie-level work on e-textiles.

With so many impressions and ideas tucked into my head, I left the conference inspired and yet tongue-tied. I knew that something profound needed to be teased out, but what?

As I prepared for and traveled to the conference, I monitored Twitter #ghc17 to get a preview of the scene at the conference.

The top tweet was a supportive rallying cry from a tireless male ally and I was inspired. As the day went on, this tweet remained as the top tweet, and it made me wonder.

As I prepared to write this post, I checked Medium itself to see impressions from Grace Hopper.

The top result was a thoughtful post from a male attendee of Grace Hopper 2016. This also made me wonder.

How can it be that representative voices of this conference about women in computing — one rising to the top for the first 24 hours and one rising to the top a year later — are not the voices of women?

As a woman of color, I’m not shocked, as I see an endless queue of folks who don’t know my experience, put into positions of being the dominant voices speaking about and around my experience, whether they like it or not.

And, I’m not asking in outrage. Here’s a :-) to prove it. I’m asking because it’s an interesting question.

I see three factors at work that produced these results:

• Content

• User behavior

• Algorithms

The content emitted an information scent and evoked user behavior that made algorithms identify it as highly relevant to users looking for information about Grace Hopper.

This is a loaded potion.

One could make guesses about why a man’s tweet supporting women would rise to the top of Twitter, besting tweets from women supporting women.

One could make guesses about why more womens’ voices speaking on Grace Hopper are not surfaced in Medium’s top search results, instead making the top story a man’s experience at the conference a year ago.

But I want to talk about the algorithm.

al·go·rithm

a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

Why the algorithm?

The algorithm is the god from the machine powering them all, for good or ill. (from How Algorithms Rule the World)

These Medium and Twitter examples illustrate symptoms of the issue that rose to the top of everything I took away from Grace Hopper: monochromatic algorithms.

The lack of diversity in technology we see today is kindling a humanitarian crisis in which ubiquitous monochromatic algorithms will marginalize any people who were not represented in their design and creation.

At this point in the flow, we’re hearing the issue surfaced at this level:

• Women are paid less than men doing the same job.

• Discrimination in the hiring process keeps women and minorities out of the tech workforce.

• We don’t have enough women and minorities in the tech workforce candidate pipeline.

But to be clear, what I’m talking about is the long-tail problem that will manifest as a result of these initial factors.

If we don’t course-correct, our lives in the future will be shaped by algorithms produced by a monochromatic tech workforce that does not understand, reflect, or empathize with its user population.

Here are just a couple of examples of these monochromatic algorithms at work:

Diane Kim

@_DianeKim

Bias in AI: when you translate this from English Turkish, a gender neutral language, then that same Turkish phrase back to English #GHC17

21.4K

2:40 PM • Oct 4, 2017

Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against Blacks.

As you hear the following buzzwords in your daily life — A.I., machine learning, neural networks, big data, data science, IoT, and “smart” anything — consider how each of these technologies involves algorithms that dictate rules for how decisions are made.

Consider how these algorithms and decision trees are currently being designed and coded by a workforce that may not be able to account for even a tiny sliver of the wide range of human experiences in this world. And that in effect, this tunnel-visioned workforce is determining outcomes in our healthcare, education, housing, environment, communication, and entertainment.

Remember that it was not until 1992 that wheelchair access became legally required for public spaces.

Also, remember that corporations are people and that some of these corporations are essentially algorithms and how given these rights, these algorithms may be given much leeway over how they control and shape our lives.

If the predictive-policing algorithm cited in the Pro Publica story above were designed by a team that included even a single person of color, would its scoring system use race as a factor?

Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.

Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.

Sure, we’ve been using flawed data for centuries, but the difference now is that these buzzwords are mesmerizing in their promise of a better world, when in reality, they could just be a false veneer over the bad data, convincing us that these algorithms know better.

How can something called Big Data be wrong?

How can an Internet of Things be bad — it’s the internet (love the internet), but with things (love things).

I’m going to overgeneralize by using my mom and dad as examples.

My mom believes that A.I. will destroy humanity by becoming smarter than us and bending us to its will.

http://giphy.com

Robot GIF by NowThis - Find & Share on GIPHY

GIPHY is the platform that animates your world. Find the GIFs, Clips, and Stickers that make your conversations more positive, more expressive, and more you.

My dad believes that A.I. will be benevolent and can’t possibly do harm because it will be like Data on Star Trek and just know to how to do the right thing.

As A.I. moves closer and closer to the heart of our lives, we must consider the words of Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) at Grace Hopper 2017:

“There is nothing artificial about A.I.”

A.I. does not spring to life on its own as pure, objective, god-like technology. Human beings with biases, conscious and otherwise, are the ones putting the “intelligence” into A.I. by designing and coding algorithms and by contributing data to models that are crowdsourced, as with the Google Translate example above.

In other words, A.I. can only be as intelligent, or dumb, as we are.

My technologist hero Jaron Lanier speaks of the myth of A.I. and how a dangerous echo chamber created when the following factors exist:

The root data is bad.

We blindly trust A.I. to do the right thing.

The user interfaces surfacing the data don’t allow us to question or point out flaws in the data.

See The Myth of AI: A Conversation With Jaron Lanier

The lack of diversity in tech is not just about fair and equal treatment in the workplace, it is also about a much larger crisis: fair and equal treatment in the digital and virtual worlds being built all around us.

As the analog world continues to fade and the virtual world comes more and more to the forefront of our lives, are we going to correct the errors and biases built into the analog world or are we going to bake these travesties in all over again?

I was in awe of the work Chieko Asakawa shared at Grace Hopper around her use of technology of help blind people be more independent and navigate the world.

https://www.ted.com

Chieko Asakawa: How new technology helps blind people explore the world

How can technology help improve our quality of life? How can we navigate the world without using the sense of vision? Inventor and IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa, who's been blind since the age of fourteen, is working on answering these questions.

And at the same time, it highlighted how sight-centric our world is and what an uphill battle it is when you need to retrofit the world to meet your needs when your experience was not considered in its design.

We must evolve our tech workforce to reflect the diversity of the real world we live in and include diverse voices in positions that can influence the technology that will shape our lives.

If we allow these algorithms and the virtual worlds we inhabit to be built by only a narrow range of people, these systems will inevitably perpetrate biases against those not represented.

We will miss out on one of the biggest opportunities in the history of the civilization to fix the most fundamental and profound wrongs in how we inhabit this world.

Imagine the end of gender- and race-based profiling and discrimination and where humanity can go without these limitations perpetrated by flawed stereotypes and data.

Imagine a world in which we are truly seen and valued for who are are and are treated according to our actual behaviors, not on what we are artificially predicted to do or want.

Imagine a world in which technology promises to make the world a better place and actually succeeds in doing so, not just for a narrow demographic, but for everyone.

To learn more, see the Asilomar AI Principles, one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles.