This morning’s Web Curios linked to a piece by Tobias Revell that’s worth reading, but for context read this Rolling Stone piece by Robert Evans about this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
This is why they are choosing to bring AGI into being. All of the jobs lost, all of the incoherent flotsam choking our internet, all of the Amazon drop shippers using ChatGPT to write product descriptions, these are but the market expressing its will. Artists must be plagiarized and children presented with hours of procedurally generated slop and lies on YouTube so that we can, one day, reach the promised land: code that can outthink a human being.
Evans is pretty skeptical of AI, and makes his case well. The evangelists tell us how AI will upend every industry, every job, every bit of culture we interact with, but as with crypto and NFTs, and with drones before that, the use cases remain niche, if they exist at all.
That sets up Revell’s piece which is much more blunt and cynical.
Effective accelerationists who are tend to lurk at the forefront of the technology and money discussion will gleefully profess that fuelling the worst excesses of capitalisms is a great idea because actually it will lead to all these things they’ve been promising: That really, the problem isn’t _that technology developed and deployed through capitalistic mechanisms will always fail to fulfil its promises as longs as the motivation is shareholder profit, _but that it’s only with more, harder, faster capitalism that these promises can be fulfilled. In the word of the angry man that promised us that blockchain, then the metaverse was the next big thing and makes all his money from selling military technology, the market is a self-correcting mechanism with the best interests of humanity at heart and so we must give over more agency to it.
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As people make decisions about whether to eat or heat their homes, as successive climate records continue to be broken, as geopolitical instability continues to deepen, the answer of big tech is AI sex toys, a pixelated rabbit that orders the most popular pizza and $3500 VR goggles.
The nut of his piece is that the hype is a smokescreen for normal capitalist exploitation:
All the promises of democratisation, liberation, creative opportunity are demonstrably disproven by a suite of technologies that isolate, divide and exploit.