I have also grown convinced that our modern conception of AI is evil because, as I look back in history, I notice that a great many of the horrific events and practices of the modern world came about because of evil attempts to reduce humans to machines.
This is one of the bedrock assumptions of fascism - not just that humans are machines, but that they should aspire to being ever more ruthlessly efficient ones - which is both why Silicon Valley has always had sinister undercurrents for those who cared to look, and why it's now the primary objective
"Efficiency" is not intrinsically evil, as a concept, but it's also not intrinsically good, nor is it *cost-free*, and I think the cult of capitalism turning it into a core moral value has done a lot of harm. There are plenty of times where optimizing for efficiency is the wrong call!
Yes, it's all about how you define efficiency and the time period. Our supply chains were extremely "efficient" and then we couldn't get toilet paper for months because of bulk vs retail packaging. Like most of Silicon Valley, bad reductions abound.
That’s why I don’t look at AI through the lens of capitalism, but instead reflexive modernity (I.e., risks flow as well as wealth). Efficiency comes at cost: generation of risks at scale, offloading them onto the less privileged, and individualization — a libertarian’s dream.
I think efficiency is intrinsically evil because it is not intrinsically good.
With a machine, the absence of a desire for an outcome inherently discounts that outcome as a criterion of success.
If you build a computer to make money without respect for human cost, you have created a murder-machine.
Humans are able to hold directly contradictory concepts in their minds at the same time, a machine in the popular sense cannot.
Nuance is the most important human quality.
If we create a computer that is able to think like a human, then why are we enslaving a human mind to our service?
That’s a massive stretch. Fascism never considers efficiency, just subordination, social (and biological) hierarchies. Feels like an appeal to emotion rather than an actual argument.
Not that many SV folks aren’t fascists, many are, but you don’t get to tar everyone who’s done AI.
Actual practicing fascism is rarely efficient at all, of course, but then neither is Silicon Valley - the ideology is the point, and one of the arguments they pull out in favor of subordination is 'making the trains run on time' if everyone sticks to their proper place
I don't mean to tar everyone works or has works in AI/ML - I just mean that large portions of the unspoken assumptions driving it in terms of industry have deep connections with that
Put another way, California ideology folks are antisocial libertarians, not fascists. Not the same thing, although worth fighting just as hard if you want to live.
Well, I happen to think antisocial libertarianism is basically a form of proto-fascism to begin with, although I don't feel like arguing about the particulars of that right now
California industry has always been more rooted in Goldwater-Reaganism and the military-industrial complex than Haight-Ashbury or the Sunset Strip (or even defectors/sellouts from the latter), but the two happening concurrently provided the perfect rebranding opportunity for the former
Fair. I am completely happy to fight what the likes of Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman do even if they don’t match the prototypical characterization of a fascist. It’s not relevant. We can fight them anyway, for their socially destructive actions.
Im not sure if the point is to tar everybody who has done AI but more to point out that the momentum of the AI model is culturally destructive
A person can do fascism without being a fascist, or operate within a system that holds fascist leanings without being overtly fascist
America has fascistic tendencies- not everybody who operates in the American system is a fascist. The focus on efficiency is not part of fascisms stated belief system, but fascists definitely do treat human beings like objects they can work and use to get an output at their workers expense
It’s less useful to worry about who is a fascist or who has fascist tendencies than who is *doing* fascism and while I don’t want to lump everybody in together, a lot of Silicon Valley and a lot of executives and people pushing mass AI adoption are doing fascism and using AI to augment it
Well yeah, they do, that’s why fascism spreads like wildfire in the right conditions. It preys on toxic masculinity and feelings we all have; fear of the unknown, the desire to be in control, irritation with people who are different, fear of the future, humiliation, the desire for revenge
But if you do that, then everything is fascist, therefore nothing is fascist. It becomes meaningless.
I have my beefs with AI today, but I’m competent in my social sciences (I’ve taught both that and AI, in my time), and it’s not the tech that’s socially destructive. It’s the people leading it.
I don’t think the point of the thread nor what I said was that AI itself is the problem, I intentionally highlighted that not everybody who participates in a system with fascist tendencies is a fascist- so like, definitionally, no it does not mean everything is fascist and the word has no meaning
Being an armed service member doesn’t make you a fascist even though the US military has some very fascist tendencies and working on AI doesn’t make you a fascist just because the executive class want to use AI to iron over the inconvenience of having to pay workers and artists
This got jumbled in the editing phase ignore the weird transition from “nor what I said” to “ai itself”, my main point was that nobody said it was AI or people working on it- but our modern conception of AI as being a “people as things” approach
But you’re still over-reaching. I’ve built AI systems, using the same tools SV use, but… everything I built “punches up”, nothing steals data, all data has explicit full consent. So, did I “participate in a system with fascist tendencies”? It sure feels like you equate me with fascist collaboration.
Sure, although you could argue that the more it embraced that tendency, the more it resembled a regular fascist state and the less successful it was at any of its' other ostensible aims
Its not a fallacy. Those mfs were opportunists and didn't change the mode of production one iota. It was still just capitalism but by another name to lend credibility to their opportunism.
It wasn't capitalism, because their objective wasn't accumulation of capital. They didn't try to maximise their profits.
If there's a continuity across 1917, it's Russian imperialism. But the economic system has changed.
all of it is marketing, where we've gone from "llms are chatbots on steroids" to "llms are intelligent" to "llms are ai" to "if computer then ai". there's so much useful stuff out there that isn't an llm chatbot, and it's all catching strays from the llm hucksters.
time to bring cybernetics back. humans and machines and systems, different but the same, living together in symphonies of harmonious feedback and control!
I'm sure nobody ever deployed the language of cybernetics to bad ends lemme just double-check and
I'm reading, via @tedunderwood.me a fun book right now on how French linguistic theory is Sekritly Deepdown Cybernetics and hence Deep Imperialism Evil (I exaggerate for effect, but that is the broad line of argument - and it is a very fun polemic). So far, doesn't join the dots to CCRU ...
ahaaha I know the one! I reverse-thrusted about 5% in as I could see it becoming a massive rabbit hole. But there is a lot of commonality, particularly with Foucault (who took Gary Becker much more seriously than most economists).
I am so fascinated by -- and, outside of knowing it is a thing that exists, ignorant of -- the role of cybernetics in vituperative French social science debates.
Ooh, a new podcast from Evgeny Morozov is dropping on June 15! A Sense of Rebellion is apparently the "second installment in Morozov’s podcast trilogy on the 'tech rebels who failed' (The Santiago Boys, on Chile’s short-lived experiment in cybernetic socialism, was the first)."
