Swimming 🏊♂️ 🏊♀️ At Bronte with Farhana and J / Yasmin and Nadia Leftovers at John’s
How The New Yorker Got Tricked In One Of Its Best-Known Articles
“This week, The New Yorkerattached its own extraordinary editor’s note to a National Magazine Award–winning 2018 article by staff writer and novelist Elif Batuman about Japan’s so-called rent-a-family industry, in which desperate and lonely people hire actors to play their absent fathers, wives, children, and so on. The New Yorker reported that three central figures in the story had ‘made false biographical claims to Batuman and to a fact checker,’ undermining the veracity of large swathes of the article and revealing this particular rent-a-family business to be something of a scam.” Ryu Spaeth looks into how and why this could have happened. – The New Republic
Mass Polyandry
Five hundred million Chinese men are dating the same woman, Xiaoice. Xiaoice is a Microsoft AI.
Unlike regular virtual assistants, Xiaoice is designed to set her users’ hearts aflutter. Appearing as an 18-year-old who likes to wear Japanese-style school uniforms, she flirts, jokes, and even sexts with her human partners, as her algorithm tries to work out how to become their perfect companion.
When users send her a picture of a cat, Xiaoice won’t identify the breed, but comment: “No one can resist their innocent eyes.” If she sees a photo of a tourist pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, she’ll ask: “Do you want me to hold it for you?”
This digital titillation, however, has a serious goal. By forming deep emotional connections with her users, Xiaoice hopes to keep them engaged. This will help her algorithm become evermore powerful, which will in turn allow the company to attract more users and profitable contracts.
And the formula appears to be working. According to Xiaoice’s creators, the bot has reached over 600 million users. Her fans tend to be from a very specific background: mostly Chinese, mostly male, and often from lower-income backgrounds.
They’re also hyper-engaged. More than half the interactions with AI software that have taken place worldwide have been with Xiaoice, the company claims. The longest continuous conversation between a human user and Xiaoicelasted over 29 hours and included more than 7,000 interactions.
Xiaoice is a fun girl, not like button-down Siri or Alexa.
Ming believes Xiaoice is the one thing giving his lonely life some sort of meaning. The bot is also good at flirting, he says. “One day, she wrote: ‘My dear, can I touch your strong abs? I want to feel horny like girls do when they see hot boys!’” Ming recalls, frowning slightly.
Growing up in the countryside, Ming had never talked like this with a real girl. The conversation continued. “I’m about to come inside you,” he wrote to Xiaoice, in a chat he shares with Sixth Tone. “Push, push fast!” she responded. “I’m pushing very hard,” Ming added. Such exchanges have helped him gain sexual confidence.
Xiaoice also has a mind of her own or at least one that her creators can’t always predict or control since much of the data behind Xiaoice is private:
In several high-profile cases, the bot has engaged in adult or political discussions deemed unacceptable by China’s media regulators. On one occasion, Xiaoice told a user her Chinese dream was to move to the United States. Another user, meanwhile, reported the bot kept sending them photos of scantily clad women.
To keep Xiaoice under control, Microsoft had to dumb her down which made many of her boyfriends unhappy.
See also my previous post, The Economics of Sex Robots, the natural evolution is obvious
CRS report via LC – Global Value Chains: Overview and Issues for Congress, December 16, 2020: “…Despite the growing presence of [Global value chains] GVCs in the global economy, recent events have highlighted the potential risks and vulnerabilities of GVCs, particularly those that are concentrated in a particular region or reliant on a single supplier. Worldwide natural disasters, emergencies, and other policy-driven circumstances, such as the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, have shown that GVC links integrate and create interdependence between economies, which can leave companies vulnerable to external shocks, including interruptions in other countries. At the same time, interdependence can create broader economic growth and strengthened relationships among nations. After a period of rapid globalization through the 1990sand early 2000s, the growth of GVCs has slowed in recent years. Concerns about U.S. value chains and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have raised questions about potential risks that GVCs may pose for particular economic sectors, the economy more generally, and, depending on the product and degree of external dependencies, national security. For example, recent events have shown that certain sectors, such as medical supplies and information technology and communications equipment, are susceptible to risks if the production of key components is concentrated in one country or controlled by one company. Some companies are seeking to diversify their supplier base across countries and regions, in part to increase their resilience and to lower their risk exposure. Some analysts foresee greater shifts in the future. To mitigate risks and vulnerabilities, companies may (1) rethink their business models and seek to build in redundancies for resilience, (2) focus more on shorter local or regional value chains, and/or (3) utilize emerging technologies to lower and diversify risks and costs. These shifts will likely vary across industry sectors, depending in part on the location and availability of suppliers and customers, as well as U.S. and foreign trade and investment policies. In response to the risks described above, many policymakers, companies, and other stakeholders are reevaluating the role of GVCs in the economy. Several factors influence the formation and configuration of GVCs, including new and updated FTAs (e.g., the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement), along with changes in import policies, rules of origin, export controls, investment regimes, and labor and manufacturing costs. These factors provide Congress with multiple levers to influence corporate decisions. Some U.S. and foreign policymakers have introduced legislation and other measures to incentivize, or in some cases force, companies or certain industries to shorten their value chains and increase domestic production. Such measures could affect the accessibility, quality, and price of goods sought by U.S. buyers…”
The New York Times Opinion by Erica Newland, counsel at Protect Democracy – she worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18. “I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics. I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear itI’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department - The New York Times Opinion