This kind of rhetoric from Bass is bad. It doesn't matter where people are from, they live here now. They contribute to LA's culture. Having representatives who also do that is good, actually.
I can tell you right now that teen boys look SO EMBARRASSED if I give them the Disapointed MOm face.
I'm not from LA either but I've lived here for 11yrs. Most of my neighbors aren't from here either, LA is an extremely diverse and immigrant heavy city. They're saying this because if they attack Raman's policies they'll have to explain why.
This is art.
You know, I knew academia had its contingent of elitist sellouts, but whew. Like, if he wants to take tech cash and outsource his thinking, ok. But it's diabolically fucked up to tell everyone else they're obsolete.
It's been wild to see academics sell out like this, because while I've never thought academia was better, I did think most academics valued THINKING.
The correct use of hater energy.
Interestingly, the intuition I felt and spoke from -- that embodied knowing -- is precisely the kind of thing AI, for all of its performative anthropomorphic gesturing at the simulacrum of personhood, can't do. Tech billionaires want us to believe that our embodied/human ways of knowing are useless!
Right? And they're always trying to obfuscate what they're doing and get huffy when they're called out. You presented this in front of other academics, many of whom actually do value critical thinking, someone was going to notice. Either own it or maybe just take the cash and leave.
This is what I've been assuming is behind so many of these types insisting we have to "accept" "AI" as inevitable and basically that thinking is obsolete. Only if you let it be.