A super thread by @oddletters about an AI chatbot passed off as psychotherapy, the MIT Media Lab, and more:
https://everything.happens.horse/@oddletters/109653584930060875
A few things worth noting:
Design-oriented schools are often weird creatures, and their integration into academia are often problematic — sketchy governance arrangements, opaque finances, wildly different assumptions about ethics, etc. I'm not defending the Media Lab, just noting it isn't entirely exceptional in this respect (which might be the most biting criticism of MITML😂).
Modern commerce pretty much *consists of* experimenting on the public at various scales. It'd be interesting to look at when and how that began. It'd be easy to fall back on nostalgic figures like "mom 'n' pop" this and "local" that, but I think better answers would come from more abstract techniques like refrigeration (basically a form of time-shifting, right?), advertising (hence questions about the type and scale of publications), and financialization.
@tb just a note: per Steenson, the Lab was not developed as a "design school" like the Stanford D-School, etc. it was designed as a funnel for military research monies (specifically from the Navy). it was only later that the "design" ethos expanded as funds from non-military sources were pursued
@oddletters With “design school” I was thinking of a range that includes architecture, film, etc, but I’ve learned to restrain my tendency to nerd out with meta-disciplinary digressions.🌞 I think even the early ML mostly fits that expanded model, but (a) I wasn’t clear, (b) Molly’s work is great, and (c) you’re right to point that out.
Arguably related: Stanford spun off SRI in large part to insulate it from Vietnam War–era student activism, in particular, from demands for financial transparency and ethics. I don’t know but suspect that was a bit of an institutional trauma, of the deep kind that might have informed the arrangements around the D-school’s establishment.