@LeftistLawyer you know AGI can't exist cos no one can explain consciousness?
What can exist is decision making machines. That's nice but the problem is when you let something else make decisions for you, you lose control of whatever it is that thing is now making decisions about.
So decisioning systems could be fine for some things, e.g. cancer detection, but really not fine for others, e.g. CV sifts.
And it just gets worse the less explainable the result is.
Our new #encyclopedia just arrived and the kids and I are giddy with excitement. Enough AI generated garbage is sludging up the internet that Google is no longer a research tool, just a portal to BS. #optout#neoLuddism
#Neoluddism#Neoluddites#AI#GenerativeAI: "Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”
Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.”"
#Luddites#Neoluddism#BigTech: "Blood in the Machine provides an engaging, entertaining, and at times enraging (in a good way) account of the Luddites. It is a book that develops a rich historical picture of the original Luddites, and that presents them in a complex and contextualized way. While no one book or author will likely ever be able to completely correct the way that Luddite is still used as an epithet (alas), it is impossible to come away from Merchant’s book thinking that the Luddites were just a gaggle of ignorant anti-technology fools. Beyond the historic Luddites, Merchant continually draws out connections between the historic Luddites and contemporary dissatisfaction with, and pushback against, “Big Tech.” Blood in the Machine is a lengthy book, and the vast majority of the book is devoted to a detailed account of the historic Luddites. And yet, in the end, Blood in the Machine is not really a book about the Luddites; rather it is a book about Luddism, and an attempt to articulate an idea of what contemporary Luddism means. This is something which becomes evident every time Merchant interrupts his historical narrative to emphasize the parallels he is explicitly drawing out between the Luddites and (for example) union organizers at Amazon. On the surface this is a book about who the Luddites were, but at its core this is a book much more interested in what the Luddites mean. Which is ultimately what makes this book worth reading and deserving of critical engagement."
One of the sad things about the proliferation of AI art is that when I see a photo like this I immediately think “That’s so cool, too bad it’s not real”.
@carnage4life that's a very perceptive observation - AI makes everyone cynical. It ages us. It kills our spirit and desire to create.
I'd also argue putting computers in everything also does that - that just turns everything into a computer.
(I'd like an authentic life please, with real things in it that make me happy. I don't want a homogenised fake one dreaming of things that aren't real. Who knows what effect this technology is having on the brains of the next generation.)
@simon_brooke@argv_minus_one this isn't the point of course. The point is computers beget more computers, and this is unnecessary.
My choice of transport is irrelevant
Hyundais choice to foist unnecessary and potentially dangerous technology on everyone is not something we should support.
And there is no justification for carbon emissions the equivalent of 400 years of commuting to generate the answer to your next sentence.
#Luddism#Neoluddism#BigTech: "Maybe instead of focusing on the tech, I’ll focus on the incentives that drive its production and deployment currently. These are too often efficiency at the expense of worker well-being, cost savings at the expense of safety and integrity, and the illusion of computational sophistication at the expense of meaningful accountability — or automation as a liability shield. This is compounded by the extraordinary concentration of power in the tech industry. By and large these imperatives are shaping what tech gets built, the stories told about it, and the growing chasm between those with the power to make and use it and those on whom it’s used, and who suffer the blunt force of its harms."
I think they already are. I would count today’s Luddites as artists and illustrators who are starting to draw red lines, like calling on newsrooms and media outlets to ban generative AI when it’s being used for clearly exploitative purposes.
The writers and actors who are striking are doing Luddism. The writers are upset that the studios want their contracts to reserve the right to have AI write scripts. Everybody knows that the technology isn’t good enough — that they will still have to call in the writers. But guess what happens if they do that? They can charge a less-valuable rewrite fee, not the fee for writing an original script. The writers aren’t anti-technological. Most would be fine saying “Give us the power to decide how we want to use ChatGPT.”"
#Luddites#Neoluddism#Tech#BigTech: "I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone.
Also, I’m a Luddite.
That’s not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.
It is that spirit that I’ve come to appreciate in the age of tech monopolies and generative artificial intelligence. The kind of visionaries we need now are those who see precisely how certain technologies are causing harm and who resist them when necessary."
This excellent comic on the history of Luddism by Tom Humberstone https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite led me to this site with folks developing 'Glaze' which is a thing artists are using to mess with AI trying to scrape their art. Check it out here: