Good starting point for any analysis of the impact of AI. From @brianmerchant recent newsletter:
"So the very first thing to understand is that, regardless of how this is framed in the media or McKinsey reports or internal memos, “AI” or “a robot” is never, ever going to take your job. It can’t. It’s not sentient, or capable of making decisions. Generative AI is not going to kill your job — but your manager might."
It feels like big tech has basically given up and has retreated to indulging in escapist fantasies: space colonization, blockchain, AGI, the network state, metaverse, "hacking death", etc.
None of this solves any problems, or, even works as advertised.
@festal Let me call it the Post-Engelbartian Situation. 1960s basic research is now exhausted. Finance capitalism doesn't allow for new basic research to take place. Even Google seems to have given up.
Wow. We barely started to talk about how bad private jet travel really is, and the US congress has already acted to protect the wealthy from public scrutiny.
I say this as a citizen of Europe (I know, this technically doesn't exist, but I still feel it's aspirational pull). The West is in its terminal phase.
Ukraine/Gaza policies might we'll be the final nail in the coffin of enlightenment values of critical reason and universal human rights. Unchecked capitalism is ripping societies apart, condemning large parts of the population to abuse and misery amidst incredible wealth. And the political system of representative democracy has been so captured by special interest that it can no longer enact broadly popular programs (social safety and environmental protection).
And the reactionary surge is only accelerating the decline.
@festal with the death of the large narratives the field was left open for the bean counters to rule. No more visions and aspirations, just managing the slow decay of everything.
If corporations are a form of slow AI, then what @pluralistic calls #enshittification is indicative of an "alignment problem", when the objective function (paperclip maximization) is persued by destructive means. And like all alignment problems, it has to do with a lack of, or the wrong, constraints.
A comprehensive overview of the possibilities to opt-out of having our website included in AI #training#data. By using robot.txt. tl,dr: it's increasingly possible, but for existing content likely too late. Removing content already indexed is close to impossible. Contrary to search engines, #AI indexes are not concerned with it reflecting the current state of the web, but simply keep adding.
A time, as good as any, to remember that Richard Serra also made very interesting films And you can find ubu.com. Such as this one: Frame, 1969, 14' 29"
Ok, Google got a lot of flak for generating historically inaccurate but vaguely diverse images of, say, medieval British kings. Obviously, none of the actual kings were black or indigenous.
I must admit, I feel a tiny sliver of sympathy for Google. They are caught up in a lose-lose situation.
On the one hand, they can try to represent the data accurately, which also means simply accepting the bias in the data itself, thus naturalizing and perpetuating the injustices from which it stems.
Or can try to correct against that bias, thus misrepresenting the data, acknowledging that the data itself is not an accurate representation of the world, and/or that the world itself is biased (say, as in police records).
So, what do you do? There is not one single answer. Sometimes correcting is good, sometimes it's bad.
And this is why my sympathy is waver-thin. The problem is scale, the attempt to find one (engineering) solution for everything. That cannot work the moment you enter the territory of meaning, which is what generative AI (but also earlier forms like machine vision) is doing.
The problem is this one-size-all approach. But of course, this is what business demands. Silicon Valley is obsessed with scale. But to scale meaning making is not just a form of colonial violence, but will also generate lots of internal contradictions.
@festal@pjorge So no Dalek invasion of 1290AD, I guess! (Random Q: has Doctor Who ever done a historical/Dalek story line? I don't recall one but my knowledge of Who is less than comprehensive ...)