Hey, friends -
Here are a few things that caught my eye this week.
1/ Vox writes about the millions of Americans who are eligible for existing welfare, the burden of paperwork, and the missed opportunity to reduce overall poverty.
Fayyad focuses on the administrative burden that's attached to many of these welfare programs.
These barriers often look like lengthy and confusing applications that require troves of documents to prove that an applicant is indeed eligible, seemingly never-ending waitlists, work requirements, interviews, and a whole learning process to figure out which programs you ought to apply for and how. There are some programs that many would-be recipients don’t even know exist.
And according to a study by the Urban Institute, if everyone who was eligible for certain assistance programs actually received those benefits, overall poverty would decrease by 31 percent and child poverty would drop by 44 percent.
This reminds me of the work that the Gates Foundation funded earlier this year to research people's perspectives and experiences with economic mobility here in the US.
2/ L.M. Sacasas writes about the enclosure of the human psyche, likening the destruction of the commons to the limiting and extraction of the human mind in a digitized society.
Sacasas writes:
When we use any given technology, we tend to be most interested in what we will be able to do with that technology. We want to know how a tool will empower us. But we should be at least as concerned with how any tool we use shapes our perception and our experience.5 We should be especially interested in these dynamics given the degree to which our view of reality, both the reality that is before us moment by moment and the larger reality that exceeds our immediate purview, is mediated by digital media, a degree that I suspect McLuhan, far-sighted as he was, could hardly fathom in the early 1960s.
Similar to the essay by Erin Kissane that I linked to last week, Sacasas talks about how the digital world shapes the non-digital world:
The senses are the gateway to the psyche. To enclose the psyche, it would be necessary to enclose the senses first. So, in this case, the fences and hedgerows become the devices that channel, direct, and colonize our perception of the world.
3/ Continuing on this thread, Bernstein et al write about embedding societal values into social media algorithms.
They write:
Social media influences what we see and hear, what we believe, and how we act - but artificial intelligence (AI) influences social media.
They argue for connecting social science research with AI:
Fields such as sociology, political science, law, communication, public health, science and technology studies, and psychology have long developed constructs to operationalize, describe, and measure complex social phenomena. These constructs have been proven reliable through repeated study and testing. In doing so, social scientists often develop measurement scales or codebooks to promote inter-rater reliability and replicability. We observe that the precision in these codebooks and constructs is now sufficient to translate into an artificial intelligence model.
They rightfully bring up questions that other companies - notably Anthropic and Meta - have been asking recently. Who gets to decide which values are valued and should be included? How should we think about universal vs sub-group values?
They end with this clarion call:
Ultimately, we contend that many of the societal challenges facing social media platforms today are failures of our own imagination—of a lack of viable alternatives—rather than irreconcilable differences in value. Our goal, and one that we think research is best positioned to contribute, is to expand this horizon of the imagination by articulating approaches to expand the set of values in our algorithms.
Which reminds me of Mandy Brown's notes on Andrea Ritchie's Practicing New Worlds:
But Ritchie (and Boggs) both shine a light on a different way: creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and then create alternatives to the existing systems. This is storytelling as action and as practice; storytelling that gets us moving when we might otherwise be stuck; storytelling that invites us to lift our heads up and see further afield, so that we might know in what direction to place our next step.
Which reminds me of Albert Hirschman and his philosophy of being a man of letters and a man of action.
4/ The G20 published a policy note on financial well-being.
As many of you know, I was on the Financial Services for the Poor team at the Gates Foundation from 2014 to 2022. During that time, I led our team's (sometimes reluctant) exploration of reframing financial inclusion to financial health.
I'll use this as a placeholder to write a longer note on the motivation for leading our work on financial health at some point in the future. But in the meantime, let's celebrate that we've come a long way from a small research grant to now having the G20 discussing and adopting financial health / financial well-being!
I've often said that reframing financial inclusion to financial health was my trojan horse to inspire better product and policy innovations; I'm hoping that the G20 will lead this space to be more expansive in its view of how it can support the real needs and lives of lower income individuals and communities around the world.
5/ And now, for something on AI: Prime Intellect releases Intellect-1, the first globally distributed, 10B parameter model.