«J’ai demandé à ChatGPT: imagine que tu es Alain Damasio et que tu veuilles écrire sur l’eau»
Le célèbre auteur de #sciencefiction a parcouru la #SiliconValley pour écrire son premier essai: un texte vertigineux qui propose une forme renouvelée de technocritique, à la mesure du basculement engendré par les IA. Rencontre dans les Alpes.
>“[#Opensource#AI] is really fundamental because it allows everyone to seize the technology, to diminish the fear of limited understanding or of not being qualified to use AI,” says Remi Cadene, head of robotics at #HuggingFace in Paris
>Open-source AI firms are meanwhile offering a better alternative to #SiliconValley.
What kind of person prefers human extinction over continued existence? There are a few obvious suspects. One is the “philosophical pessimist” who argues that the world is full of so much human suffering that the nonexistence of our species is better than continued existence. Another is a certain stripe of radical environmentalist who claims that humanity is so destructive to the biosphere, that only our extinction can save what remains of the natural world.
Then there is a third group of people who aren’t bothered by the possibility of human extinction, and indeed some hope to actively bring it about in the coming decades. They represent a more dangerous and extreme form of pro-extinctionist ideology that is fairly widespread within Silicon Valley. In fact, some of the most powerful people in the tech world are members of this group, such as the co-founder of Google, Larry Page." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/team-human-vs-team-posthuman-which-side-are-you-on/
#AI#GenerativeAI#BigTech#SiliconValley: "The heart of the problem is that generative AI is not really designed to address actual social problems. We urgently need the expertise of social scientists to be able to make much-needed collective decisions about the future of generative AI that we want; we can’t leave it to business, markets or technologists. We need to turn to these experts to understand our social or collective problems and the challenges we want generative AI to address. We then need to work out whether – not simply how – artificial intelligence can contribute to finding viable solutions, and then getting AI companies to focus on producing those solutions." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-generative-artificial-intelligence-is-simply-a-waste-of-our-time-and/
#AI#GenerativeAI#BigTech#SiliconValley#Cartography: "The set of relationships presented here forms a mosaic that is difficult to grasp because it involves the linking of objects and knowledge of different kinds and scales. The discourses surrounding AI often have a strong mythic charge and are accompanied by a series of recurring metaphors and imaginaries: algorithmic agencies detached from human action, the non-negotiable technology that imposes the future on us, the universality of data, or the ability to produce models free of bias or worldviews. The set of discourses that surround these technologies, whether they are more specialised or more popular, end up shaping them in one way or another. For this reason, the Cartography of Generative AI project is based on the motivation to offer a conceptual map that covers a large part of the actors and resources involved in this complex and multifaceted object we call Generative AI. Drawing on a long genealogy of critical cartographies dedicated to wresting the function of maps as producers of hegemonic truths, this visualisation aims to map the phenomenon, taking into account the tensions, controversies and ecosystems that make it possible." https://cartography-of-generative-ai.net/
#STS#SiliconValley#Technocapitalism: "In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth." https://www.dukeupress.edu/silicon-valley-imperialism
#Journalism#Media#News#BigTech#SiliconValley#TechJournalism: "This apparent about-face of Silicon Valley prompted Swisher to undertake some agonized soul-searching, the results of which have been published as Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, a tortured and tortuous memoir that, in remixing swaths of past reporting and commentary, as well as regurgitating tales she’s told ad nauseam, tries to answer two burning questions: How did Silicon Valley end up in that room with Trump? And, more importantly, how did a tech journalist as good and uncompromising as Kara Swisher fail to anticipate this turn to the dark side?
The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.
#SciFi#ScienceFiction#SpaceExploration#Mars#Capitalism#SiliconValley: "If you listen to the libertarians pushing the notion of space settlement, you could be tricked into believing that Mars is some kind of distant paradise-in-the-making that we need only seize and remake for our species. As the crises escalate here on planet Earth, the solution isn’t to do all we can to make a world that works for all, but to find a new frontier that will magically cure all of our ills. Except there isn’t an ounce of truth in those stories.
Mars is no backup planet. It’s a hostile world where humans can’t breathe without technological assistance, can’t walk freely on the surface without a space suit, and would have to live far underground to avoid developing cancer from the radiation on the surface since the world has no magnetosphere. As Zach and Kelly Weinersmith explain in A City on Mars, the soil on Mars is toxic and not as easy to clean as boosters of space settlement like to suggest. There’s also very little research on the social and biological considerations of long-term habitation in space, particularly reproduction and child rearing in a hostile environment that lacks the gravity we’ve evolved to live with. And that’s before considering the legal questions that people like Musk pretend don’t exist.
There’s no future for humanity in space — or at least not for such a long time that it’s pointless to make sacrifices to try to realize it in the present. Intergalactic travel and adaptation to different planets seems easy in science fiction because the challenges can be ignored or explained away so as not to get in the way of the story — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Science fiction’s job isn’t to predict the future, but to use an imagined universe as a setting to probe the problems of the present." https://disconnect.blog/what-if-we-never-live-on-mars/
Oh look! I have a pre-Google map of Sunnyvale! Look at that giant undeveloped land at Wolfe and Homestead! Maybe someday someone will put a duck pond there. Can someone give me directions to Leonard Ave? It's not coming up on Apple Maps. #Sunnyvale#SiliconValley#mapping#gis#maps#history
I've been playing with the #WindowMaker version of #Debian recently, just to remember the old, good #NextSTEP, #OpenSTEP era. I used to have a #NeXTStation but I sold it locally for $300 just before I left US for Greece. It could probably fetch thousands on eBay, but I didn't want to deal with shipping such a heavy item.
Ah, I miss the old #SiliconValley. Back when there was actually room to innovate in ways that were revolutionary, and not just additive.
#AI#UK#BigTech#AIRegulation#SiliconValley: "The UK’s AI economy remains narrow, larger on paper than in its footprint in our society. Those advantages it does enjoy over its European peers are precarious and in certain respects are being eroded by underinvestment. And the shape, pace, and direction of AI development in the UK is dictated not in Westminster or Whitehall, but overwhelmingly in the boardrooms and pitch decks of Silicon Valley.
This is at least in part because of our attachment to the founding myth of British AI policy: that of the arms race. Arms race narratives are implicitly linear, positioning individual states as able to influence the pace but not the direction of economic development and technological change. They take for granted that increased support for UK firms will lead to the UK becoming a global leader in AI development, and that achieving this position will—by virtue of “winner-takes-all” dynamics and the putative tendency of wealth to “trickle down”—deliver sustained value for the public.
The arms race offers a fantasy of independence that masks deeper structural dependence on a paradigm of AI development led by, and wholly dependent on, funding and infrastructures provided by Silicon Valley. In this sense the question we started with from Ian Hogarth is misframed: it is not clear to what extent DeepMind ever represented a truly “independent entity,” given how intertwined its early history was with US venture capital68 and how wedded its aspirations were to the existing Silicon Valley model."
#Culture#BigTech#SocialMedia#Algorithms#SiliconValley: "The main defect with Filterworld is diagnostic: A focus on Big Tech’s colonization of culture obscures both the additional forces driving stagnation and the way those forces interact with technology to make the social media platforms such a formidable obstacle to cultural renewal. Is tech responsible for everything? Hollywood, the MFA industry, and America’s unequal education system, which makes the kind of deep instruction needed to engage meaningfully with the canon today available to only the very rich, surely bear just as much responsibility for our intellectually flattened times as the warped incentives of the BookTok reel do.
The big platforms have benefited from good timing, planting their flags in cultural terra firma at the exact moment when economic inequality and the distance between political elites and voters are at their widest since the Gilded Age, and the misalignments of rentier capitalism—handing a greater and greater share of wealth to asset owners—mean those gaps are only likely to grow. The collision of asset inflation with consumer technology’s incomparable distributional powers makes culture, as it’s exhibited online, both a powerful motor of social emulation (we want what they have) and a kind of consolation prize, a false democratizer for an unequal age. The playing field in actually existing capitalism may be scandalously uneven, but the online mediation of culture (in truth more an interruption) helps us all nourish a fantasy of equality at the level of creation. Il faut être absolument online.
#AI#EU#GenerativeAI#Mistral#Microsoft#BigTech#Monopolies#SiliconValley: "Max von Thun, Europe director at the Open Markets Institute, told Jacobin that the new partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI is symptomatic of the “huge structural concentration that you see in the tech sector, which is not new, which has been around for a long time, but which has basically put the big tech companies in a position to essentially co-opt or neutralize any potential players in AI who might challenge them directly.”
Mistral has built its identity around its open-source model that can be modified and adapted by clients. What it stands to gain from its partnership with Microsoft is access to the latter’s enormous computing power and key position in market infrastructure.
“Here’s the catch: I can build an open-source model, but the challenge is to get it to the market and to the customer. As a company, that is what I care about,” Kris Shrishak, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told Jacobin. “Distribution is a problem because they’re still a business. They need to make money. Microsoft gives them a pathway to that, by integrating it and offering it on their Azure marketplace." https://jacobin.com/2024/03/mistral-france-eu-monopoly-ai-regulation
#EA#EffectiveAltruism#SiliconValley: "C: So it sounds like the EA work was not just an excuse to sit around, but an excuse not to do laundry.
E: Pretty much. There’s something so strange about people like taking themselves and their time so seriously that they think about things like replaceability and is it better to have someone else doing this thing because my time is better spent doing that or like should I pursue this particular job if there’s someone else there who could do it just as well are better than I could have been, so I should do something else, just as like really intense emphasis on how you use your time on the that level is kind of weird and unhealthy.
C: Yeah, it sounds like it’s very economic talk, like very much competitive advantage, as in you want to optimize your competitive advantage versus optimizing your quality of life or your happiness or how much love you have.
E: Exactly. And yeah, I think there’s this intense emphasis on rationality and logic, which I think appealed to me at first, because I’m a very logical person, and I was a philosophy student. I mean, in some ways, a lot of the EA thinking is great. Like, for example, when you’re thinking about where to donate, I think it’s great that you put the emphasis on logic and on research, right? Like, let’s actually give money to the organizations that are cost-effective and where the money is gonna make the most difference instead of just the ones that have the biggest brand-new budget, so you’ve heard of them. And in that way, I think that the emphasis of logic is great, but then I think in a lot of ways they take it way too far to the point where you’re losing things like emotion and empathy and passion."
Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.
Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.
This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.
Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.
The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.
But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.
What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.
And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.
We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri
In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed , a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work.
But while it is largely a guide to making money in the new economy he describes, he also implores us to not let it “spiral out of control”. The key to this, he argues, is asserting human agency through digital literacy.
What unites many of the misshapen and malevolent encounters between humans and algorithms, Kowalkiewicz argues, is our misunderstandings of what they can do.
An algorithm is a step by step set of instructions – “like a recipe” for a computer. While an algorithm may be very good, even “superhuman” at its job within those defined parameters, these minions require a more adaptable human brain to help them overcome unforeseen challenges.
Flexibility and interpretation, Kowalkiewicz writes, are skills “not easily reduced to coded rules” and so are areas in which humans can outperform algorithms – for the “foreseeable” future.
#Internet#InternetFreedom#DigitalRights#AI#SiliconValley: "There can only be one conclusion from all of this: the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.
The time for tinkering around the edges has passed, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the only hope to be found today is in seeking to tear down the edifice the tech industry has erected and to build new foundations for a different kind of internet that isn’t poisoned by the requirement to produce obscene and ever-increasing profits to fill the overflowing coffers of a narrow segment of the population.
There were many networks before the internet, and there can be new networks that follow it. We don’t have to be locked into the digital dystopia Silicon Valley has created in a network where there was once so much hope for something else entirely. The ongoing erosion already seems to be sending people fleeing by ditching smartphones (or at least trying to reduce how much they use them), pulling back from the mess that social media has become, and ditching the algorithmic soup of streaming services.
Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone."
California Forever, the billionaire-backed effort to create a new community from scratch in Solano County, has begun collecting signatures to try to put its initiative on the November ballot. Here’s our look at the promises by the company, and how they would affect county and state taxpayers.
I've been away from the platform for a while because I felt overwhelmed, though I'm not even sure by what. It was just a period filled with events, and I couldn't handle it, I guess. I've been away from not just the platform, but many things that matter to me: chats with friends I care about, online projects—everything felt utterly beyond my reach. I could only focus on surviving. This evening, I'm feeling different and I hope to remain in this state for the months ahead.
‘The Devil in Silicon Valley
Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans’ by Stephen J. Pitti. This book covers the history of racism against Mexican-Americans within #siliconvalley in #california from the Gold Rush to the #tech industry of today. #exploitation#latino#chicano@bookstodon