Linkage

Climate and housing are vitally connected, and acknowledging this turns a pair of calamities into one huge opportunity.

That’s the message from the national Task Force for Housing and Climate, a cross-partisan group of former politicians and policy experts that launched in September and released their final report on March 5. The non-governmental task force convened fifteen heavy hitters from across the country, including former Conservative cabinet minister Lisa Raitt and Edmonton’s progressive former mayor Don Iveson as co-chairs, as well as economist and former governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney and former Toronto chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat. The group has created a road map for 5.8 million “affordable, low-carbon and resilient” homes to be built by 2030.

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If all this sounds wildly optimistic, somewhere between wartime effort and fever dream on the scale of probabilities, well, so is the fight against climate change. One could take heart from the fact that, last fall, housing minister Fraser told the CBC “this is a wartime effort we need to adopt.” There’s also the fact that the debate over housing policy hasn’t suffered the same partisan warping that afflicts climate policy. Nobody in Canada is arguing the housing crisis is a hoax or wildly overblown; instead, every party is now competing to prove it has the best, most aggressive solution.

Ah, private equity; is there any bad situation you can't make much, much worse?

In the midst of an affordable housing crunch and with yearslong Section 8 voucher waitlists, manufactured homes tend to be a more affordable option compared with traditional site-built houses, particularly for seniors and low-income households. A factory-built home can be a steppingstone for families pursuing homeownership or the last stop before falling into homelessness. But advocates say manufactured housing is quickly becoming unaffordable as private equity firms buy up parks and raise rents. In some cases, it’s unclear who owns the lots, making it easier for maintenance problems to go unaddressed.

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A household that lives in a manufactured home may own the structure but rent the land on which it sits. For many, “mobile” may be a misnomer.

“It's difficult, expensive or outright impossible to move these homes and so residents are forced to tolerate escalating rents, arbitrary fees, lack of transparency in billing and failure to invest in the maintenance of park properties, all which contribute to their housing insecurity,” said Esther Sullivan, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, at the Senate committee hearing.

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“It's really frustrating as someone who has spent time in social services for so long to not be able to help people, particularly when they're in your city and you should have some jurisdiction over situations like these, where the living conditions are compromising the residents’ health, safety and well-being. We should be able to do something and hold those people accountable,” said Warren City Council President Angela Rogensues, who spearheaded the nuisance complaint.

Rogensues told state lawmakers last month that many parks are in “tremendous disrepair.” She reported seeing residents dealing with rat infestation, trees growing through trailers, trip hazards and trailers filled with garbage in 2022. Rogensues said she reached out to city and state departments and was told they didn’t have jurisdiction over mobile home parks. The city cannot test to regulate the water once it enters the park, she said, meaning the owner is responsible for the water quality. 

“Renters of mobile homes and even owners of mobile homes do not fall into a category I can regulate or enforce,” she told lawmakers.

But social values were very much on the mind of Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born designer who created the first enclosed mall in the United States, Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, in 1956. Gruen wanted to give patrons a version of the lively and intensely social shopping districts he remembered from the Vienna where he grew up. It wouldn’t just be a collection of stores — it would include schools, post offices, medical centers and museums. A modern mall, especially in a cold-climate place like Minnesota, would be a sort of urban market town, a Main Street under glass.

In the years before his death in 1980, Gruen realized and regretted the failure of his creations to meet his original vision. They may have been pedestrian-friendly in their way, but they were nevertheless islands in a sea of parking. And the idea of a shopping mall as a key element in modern social life was rarely mentioned. 

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When you look at what has happened to many of the dead malls of the last century, you find a whole variety of retrofits. Some of them have simply been torn down, of course, but others have been repurposed to contain housing, hotels, museums, gyms, churches, senior centers, libraries and a whole variety of other features. Many of these are public enterprises, successors to the strictly private mall operations that have dominated shopping-center history.

In perhaps the most startling transformation, Gruen’s Southdale Center in Minnesota, the first of the fully enclosed malls of the 1950s, is being re-created as a multipurpose development that includes luxury hotel rooms and apartment complexes, a fitness center in place of a defunct J.C. Penney store, medical clinics and day care for children, and a variety of other public and private properties.

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Ironic as it may seem, malls such as Southdale are moving closer to being the entity that Victor Gruen envisioned — places where different segments of the community can gather and find their basic needs as well as their consumer desires met, and also satisfy their desire for sociability.

Lately, a moral panic has been brewing. People in the media, government, and across the internet are declaring that children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis and that smartphones and social media are to blame. But is this even true?

I talked to danah boyd, the top researcher on kids and social media use, about some of the problems that young people today are facing, why quick fixes like banning social media apps are never the answer, and what we can actually do to help younger generations.

I have to admit that it’s breaking my heart to watch a new generation of anxious parents think that they can address the struggles their kids are facing by eliminating technology from kids’ lives. I’ve been banging my head against this wall for almost 20 years, not because I love technology but because I care so deeply about vulnerable youth. And about their mental health. And boy oh boy do I loathe moral panics. I realize they’re politically productive, but they cause so much harm and distraction.

I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. (I wish I could believe many things that are empirically not true. Like that there is no climate crisis.) Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is ecological. As a researcher, I know that young people’s relationship with tech is so much more complicated than pundits wish to suggest. I also know that the hardest part of being a parent is helping a child develop a range of social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can be independent. And I know that excluding them from public life or telling them that they should be blocked from what adults values because their brains aren’t formed yet is a type of coddling that is outright destructive. And it backfires every time.

I’m also sick to my stomach listening to people talk about a “gender contagion” as if every aspect of how we present ourselves in this world isn’t socially constructed. (Never forget that pink was once the ultimate sign of masculinity.) Young people are trying to understand their place in this world. Of course they’re exploring. And I want my children to live in a world where exploration is celebrated rather than admonished. The mental health toll of forcing everyone to assimilate to binaries is brutal. I paid that price; I don’t want my kids to as well.

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Please please please center young people rather than tech. They need our help. Technology mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. It’s what makes the struggles young people are facing visible. But it is not the media effects causal force that people are pretending it is.

Modern AI models are trained by feeding them "publicly-available" text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct.

Theoretically, the more training data that these models receive, the more accurate their responses will be, or at least that's what the major AI companies would have you believe. Yet AI researcher Pablo Villalobos told the Journal that he believes that GPT-5 (OpenAI's next model) will require at least five times the training data of GPT-4. In layman's terms, these machines require tons of information to discern what the "right" answer to a prompt is, and "rightness" can only be derived from seeing lots of examples of what "right" looks like.

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In essence, the AI boom requires more high-quality data than currently exists to progress past the point we're currently at, which is one where the outputs of generative AI are deeply unreliable. The amount of data it needs is several multitudes more than currently exists at a time when algorithms are happily-promoting and encouraging AI-generated slop, and thousands of human journalists have lost their jobs, with others being forced to create generic search-engine-optimized slop. One (very) funny idea posed by the Journal's piece is that AI companies are creating their own "synthetic" data to train their models, a "computer-science version of inbreeding" that Jathan Sadowski calls Habsburg AI.

Acceptance speech upon receiving the 2024 Helmut Schmidt Future Prize:

Make no mistake – I am optimistic – but my optimism is an invitation to analysis and action, not a ticket to complacency.

With that in mind, I want to start with some definitions to make sure we’re all reading from the same score. Because so often, in this hype-based discourse, we are not. And too rarely do we make time for the fundamental questions – whose answers, we shall see, fundamentally shift our perspective. Questions like, what is AI? Where did it come from? And why is it everywhere, guaranteeing promises of omniscience, automated consciousness, and what can only be described as magic?

Well, first answer first: AI is a marketing term, not a technical term of art. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956 by cognitive and computer scientist John McCarthy – about a decade after the first proto-neural network architectures were created. In subsequent interviews McCarthy is very clear about why he invented the term. First, he didn’t want to include the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener in a workshop he was hosting that summer. You see, Wiener had already coined the term “cybernetics,” under whose umbrella the field was then organized. McCarthy wanted to create his own field, not to contribute to Norbert’s – which is how you become the “father” instead of a dutiful disciple. This is a familiar dynamic for those of us familiar with “name and claim” academic politics. Secondly, McCarthy wanted grant money. And he thought the phrase “artificial intelligence” was catchy enough to attract such funding from the US government, who at the time was pouring significant resources into technical research in service of post-WWII cold war dominance.

Now, in the course of the term’s over 70 year history, “artificial intelligence” has been applied to a vast and heterogeneous array of technologies that bear little resemblance to each other. Today, and throughout, it connotes more aspiration and marketing than coherent technical approach. And its use has gone in and out of fashion, in time with funding prerogatives and the hype-to-disappointment cycle.

So why, then, is AI everywhere now? Or, why did it crop up in the last decade as the big new thing?

The answer to that question is to face the toxic surveillance business model – and the big tech monopolies that built their empires on top of this model.

While I’m guessing, the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously-suppressed sites, heavily suggests that Google’s response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search results.

A few months later in May 2019, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads are shown on the platform on Google’s mobile search, replacing the bright green “ad” label and URL color on ads with a tiny little bolded black note that said “ad,” with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link. I guess that's how it started hitting their numbers following the code yellow.  

In January 2020, Google would bring this change to the desktop, which The Verge’s Jon Porter would suggest made “Google’s ads look just like search results now.”

Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow debacle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler taking his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume. 

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.

“The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps,” says Microsoft in the update notes of its latest public Windows 11 release. “These apps come from a small set of curated developers.” The ads are designed to help Windows 11 users discover more apps, but will largely benefit the developers that Microsoft is trying to tempt into building more Windows apps.