Weekly Grounding #129
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are back this week after a brief hiatus!
For those of you who are new here, Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“‘No One Else Has It,’ Claims Trump When Asked About ‘Secret Sonic Weapon’ Used in Venezuela”
Common Dreams reports on Fifth Generation Warfare in Venezuela: “Asked about the existence or use of…a ‘sonic weapon’ by NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich—and whether Americans should be concerned about it—Trump responded, ‘No one else has it. We have weapons that no one knows about. It’s probably better not to talk about it, but we have amazing weapons. It was an amazing attack.’”
“It’s no secret that the US military has been developing sonic weapons, which can use sound waves or focused microwaves to cause pain or discomfort to those targeted,” the article reports. “Such ‘directed energy weapons’ have been referred to simply as ‘pain rays,’ but go by various names, depending on the technology being used.”
“White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared an English-language translation of a purported interview with a Venezuelan ‘security guard loyal to Maduro,’ who described the night of the assault by US forces. In the interview, the veracity of which cannot be independently verified and reeked to some as a clear example of US-generated propaganda or counterintelligence, the guard described ‘a massacre’ by US personnel who, he said, ‘launched something—I don’t know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.’”
“Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid”
The Wall Street Journal reports that “Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, highlighting how AI models are gaining traction in the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“Anthropic was the first AI model developer to be used in classified operations by the Defense Department,” the Journal’s exclusive report continues. “It is possible other AI tools were used in the Venezuela operation for unclassified tasks. The tools can be used for everything from summarizing documents to controlling autonomous drones. Adoption by the military is seen as a key boost for AI companies that are competing for legitimacy and seeking to live up to their enormous valuations from investors.”
“Anthropic’s concerns about how Claude can be used by the Pentagon have pushed administration officials to consider canceling its contract worth up to $200 million…Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other CEOs have been publicly grappling with the power of their models and the risks they could pose to society. Amodei has broken with many other industry executives in calling for greater regulation and guardrails to prevent harms from AI. The safety-focused company and others in the industry have lost workers who have described them as giving priority to growth over responsible technology development.”
“A.I. Is Coming to Class. These Professors Want to Ease Your Worries”
Many college professors now actively encourage the use of AI in their classrooms, The New York Times reports. Barnard College writing professor, Benjamin Breyer, argues that AI “‘is no threat to us at present…[It] may help with the expression of an idea and articulating that expression. But the idea itself, the thing that’s hardest to teach, is still going to remain our domain.’ During the past two years, he and a computer programmer spent thousands of hours developing a chatbot they named Althea, after the Grateful Dead song. ‘I don’t think that I’m writing my own obituary by creating this at all,’ he said. ‘It’s a tool.’”
“Professor Breyer found that off-the-shelf bots were not good enough to teach the academic skills that students needed to help them engage in scholarly conversation. So he applied for about $30,000 in grants and additional technical support to build the tool, which uses a customizable OpenAI platform and exists on a website called academicwritingtools.com. To train it to mimic his own feedback, he fed it transcripts of his lectures, the materials read in the course and samples of exemplary student work. To tamp down generative A.I.’s typical eagerness to please, he told it to be less flattering.”
Despite his pride in Althea, “after one year of testing, Professor Breyer found that overall, the students who didn’t use A.I. did better on his writing exercises than the students who used Althea.” His students were divided on the academic chatbot. “‘It’s honest,’ Riya Shivaram…said. ‘It’s not looking to please people and not looking to prove you wrong.’ Charlotte Mills disagreed. ‘I very much prefer getting broad feedback, like from Professor Breyer, rather than getting feedback on every single step of the assignment,’ she said.”
“Is AI Making Work More Intense?”
John Burn-Murdoch writes at The Financial Times that “One of the more surprising side-effects of the agentic AI explosion over the past few months has been the growing number of anecdotal reports of people in tech and adjacent fields experiencing burnout, as they struggle to settle into a new working rhythm now that they find themselves effectively leading teams of tireless digital workers.”
“Those anecdotes were made more concrete in a report published earlier this month in the Harvard Business Review, in which two researchers from the University of California Berkeley set out their findings from a study of how AI was changing work habits at a US tech company. They saw an increase in both the number of hours worked (extending into early mornings and evenings) and the intensity of that work, as well as a broadening of the range of tasks people took on. Most notably, the company neither asked for these changes or even mandated the use of AI tools at all—the behavioural shifts happened organically.”
Burn-Murdoch notes that “The researchers identified three main dynamics at play. First, the ability to use AI to fill gaps in existing knowledge led workers to take on more and broader responsibilities, such as managers writing code to tackle problems they would previously have outsourced. Second, the ease of starting and finishing new tasks led workers to fit new bits of work into gaps between meetings or larger pieces of work that would once have been breaks or opportunities to chat to a colleague. And third, the ability to hand off tasks to AI agents led to a surge of multitasking, with workers setting a handful of pieces of work in motion and moving back and forth between them as they progressed.
“While each step along the way may have been voluntary, the overall result was an unwitting shift into a new, fast-paced and always-on way of working that left many feeling uneasy, not to mention exhausted. The process also brings new risks, such as impaired judgment due to mental overload, or the build-up of ‘cognitive debt’ when agentic-AI-assisted projects simply get too much done too quickly for the humans in the loop to stay abreast of the finer details of the work.”
“‘You Were Never a Slave’”
At her eponymous Substack, Yvette Carnell writes that “Viola Fletcher, the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, lived long enough to testify before Congress—and to die without restitution. She was 111 years old. America noticed her briefly, praised her courage, and moved on.”
She argues that “Fletcher was not a civil rights activist, despite being labeled as one by former President Barack Obama. She was a reparations activist. The distinction matters because calling her a civil rights figure allowed the country to celebrate her survival without confronting its obligation. Reparations, by contrast, would have required payment. Obama did not believe she was owed that because he did not believe in reparations. Obama is not an American Descendant of Slavery (ADOS), and he was never rooted in that history. Raised largely by his white grandparents, he approached racial redress as a political complication rather than a moral debt. That distance shaped his approach to race & redress during his presidency.”
Carnell notes that “Over $43.6 billion in federal funds have been allocated to Native American tribes through recent legislation alone, including the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan. No one asked ADOS how we felt about it. No one objected on the grounds of competing needs. Redress, when politically convenient, is treated as routine. Even during slavery, there were instances—rare but real—where enslaved people or their descendants inherited land from their former owners through wills. America has paid reparations for internment, environmental disaster, discriminatory lending, wrongful imprisonment, and state violence. What it has consistently refused is reparations for American slavery and racial terror.
“The standard rebuttal is familiar: you were never a slave. The implication is that ADOS today did not suffer the harm directly, but Viola Fletcher did…The question was never whether or not a person had directly endured the harm. Viola Fletcher proved that. The question was who America was willing to recognize as a victim. Fletcher died knowing the answer.”
“Existential Freedom and Social Liberation”
At The Unfolding, Jane Cecilia suggests that “freedom is both a social condition and an existential one. Perhaps it’s always both personal and communal. Freedom rises up from our inner courage and it is realized distinctly in social transformation. Courage and conscience can become a public practice through the intersection of existential selfhood and social liberation.”
She writes that Søren “Kierkegaard helps us understand the inner experience of freedom and the personal side of courage. He helps us see that freedom begins with confronting our own responsibility and our Angst, anxiety. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] shows how the inner courage to maintain personal responsibility in the face of systemic injustice can be translated into collective, transformative action. Drawing from both men, we see a picture of freedom that is deeply personal and fully embodied; this freedom depends on our relationships with others, and is directed toward moral justice.”
She notes that “Kierkegaard himself lived much of his life in tension with the crowd, because for him, freedom requires standing alone in decision, bearing the weight of uncertainty, and choosing to become the kind of person one is responsible for being. Conformity cannot be permitted; we must personally engage with our own values and responsibilities. This genuine individuality, though it may be terrifying, is really the only way Kierkegaard sees to a free and meaningful existence. This way, we discover that ethical responsibility cannot be delegated—at least not without internal avoidance, ignoring the self, which results in blind conformity rather than a full, authentic life. Any genuine relationship with self or other relies on the inward integrity made possible by this embrace of responsibility.”
“Like Kierkegaard, King critiques the crowd, but with an important difference: whereas Kierkegaard feared the dissolving of self into unthinking conformity, MLK feared the collective’s adjustment to injustice. King repeatedly returned to the prophet’s cry in Amos that justice must ‘roll down like waters,’ reading it as a demand that courage take material, public form. For him, freedom becomes real only when it is enacted with the body: it must be marched, and spoken, and risked. In this he was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi. Dr. King talked about the idea of creative maladjustment, which is a refusal to adapt to evil or injustices like the sickness of segregation. He frames this creative maladjustment as courageous, an ethical and nonviolent stance.”
Cecelia concludes: “Kierkegaard and King converge on the idea that freedom is born in risk. Both resist the false division between private conscience and public action. Kierkegaard captures this in his image of a person standing at the edge of a cliff, seized not only by the fear of falling but by the startling awareness that they might choose to leap: this is the moment when possibility reveals responsibility, and the self discovers it cannot hand off the burden of choice. King takes this inward vertigo and turns it outward: the trembling recognition of possibility becomes the march, the sit-in, and the willingness to place one’s body in a jail cell for the sake of justice.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
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