As I've said here before, perhaps the best way of thinking about all this is to return to the work of #LewisMumford who makes the distinction between Authoritarian Technics & Democratic Technics... which encourages us to focus not on the characteristic(s) of #technology, but rather the #political interests of those who deploy & promote it.
@ChrisMayLA6
So now we have AI. You want us to make choices about it as a society, but that presupposes that we can foresee what it will do and how it will develop.
The concerns of today, and any rules we create to manage them, are almost certain to seem laughably naive in another 10 years; either they will have been proven false, or the rules will have been leapfrogged by the tech. Meantime there will be real problems that we haven't forseen.
A agree & that's where I think the value in Mumford lies, it encourages us to look a little less at the tech itself, and more to the agents/organisations/states using it & how they are framing that use...
@ChrisMayLA6
Yes, I very much agree as far as that goes. Its just that when I ask myself "what sort of regulations / controls might make sense for AI" I find myself facing a wall of fog.
@ChrisMayLA6
The only part of the Communications Decency Act to survive was Sec 230, which insulates platforms against user posts. This is widely disliked, but its hard to see any workable alternative.
Barlow's tech determinism was optimistic: he saw the exclusion of govt as Good, but he didn't foresee that this could also lead to Fake News and Trump.
OTOH Barlow was reacting to govt attempts to rein in this new space, such as the Clipper Chip, which now look equally quaint. Though efforts on those lines continue.
In an earlier stage of my pre-retirement academic life I was quite involved with FLOSS issues (partly due to my work on #intellectualproperty) so am aware of JPB & the FLOSS crowd - also had a piece on DRMs from that standpoint in First Monday 20 years ago... and thanks for the feedback in the other replies/posts - interesting perspective(s)!
@ChrisMayLA6
To me as an engineer the Q "does tech change society or society change tech" is a false dichotomy. Its obviously a feedback loop in a chaotic system (in the maths sense). Tech enables new choices, and people make those choices, which affects the tech. "People" means individuals, companies & govt. This is not tech or social determinism, but rather seeing both as parts of a whole.
@ChrisMayLA6 Computers are also interesting. The first computers were authoritarian: one big mainframe in the basement, tended by priests. Then departmental mini-computers became a thing, moving power down to middle mgmt dept heads. Then Apple ][s appeared on desks, creating democratisation of computer power in the org. Then computer networks allowed IT depts to exert central control once more.
@ChrisMayLA6
Nice article. Lots to think about. I hadn't encountered Mumford's ideas before.
Cars: interesting to compare how the West developed vs the USSR. In the USSR public transport was emphasised and cars took 2nd place. In "Next Stop Execution" Oleg Gordievsky mentions that his car was garaged 2km from his flat and had failed its MOT. For the USSR of course the choke-point nature of public transport was the point, regardless of what people wanted.
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