Watching - and experiencing - big tech march forward with close to zero concern for the societal costs, I keep recalling this talk that Neil Postman gave to Apple employees in 1993. He considers the development of computers in the context of his arguments, emphasising the costs and unexpected consequences that always come with technological developments. During the Q&A, Postman said:
…television should be the last technology we will allow to have been invented and promoted mindlessly. Ok, we just didn't know that much, so we got television and it's changed our culture, but that's it, from now on every technology we have to think about.
And, of course, this is precisely what we did not do with computers. Or smartphones. Or social media. Or LLMs.
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On viewing the first nuclear Trinity explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted a line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I wonder if Steve Jobs said the same thing on creating the iPhone.
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Shoshana Zuboff’s 2022 article is one that keeps bouncing around my mind. Note the subtitle: ‘Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization’. I think she is correct framing it in this somewhat Schmittian way, because these are the stakes. Zuboff is clear:
Without new public institutions, charters of rights, and legal frameworks purpose-built for a democratic digital century, citizens march naked, easy prey for all who steal and hunt with human data. In result, both the liberal democracies and all societies engaged in the struggle to build, defend and strengthen democratic rights and institutions now stumble toward a future that their citizens did not and would not choose: an accidental dystopia owned and operated by private surveillance capital but underwritten by democratic acquiescence, cynicism, collusion, and dependency.
One important feature she emphasises: the total blindness of these actors and their tools, what she calls ‘radical indifference’ to the content of data, ‘blind by design to meaning or truth’. From this, Zuboff reaches the conclusion:
In the 21st century, the engineering imperative of blindness by design yields catastrophic harms as all bits and bytes are welcomed into the global information bloodstream for immediate human-to-human transmission. The lesson: When social information is transmitted as a bulk commodity through blind systems optimized for volume and velocity, the result is epistemic chaos characterized by widespread uncontrollable information corruption.
We know we know, still I think we struggle to fully appreciate the extent to which we have ceded control of our societal infrastructure to actors and tools that are completely devoid of any moral compass or social responsibility.
Silicon Valley wears a thinly made human mask to conceal the faceless face beneath.
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An important aspect to ongoing US-China tensions is anger over IP theft and industrial espionage. And yet, apparently little concern over news that Meta has trained its LLM with torrented data from LibGen. We are experiencing perhaps the greatest expropriation of human labour and achievement in real-time, in public, in the open. Fair use indeed.
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C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters:
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.
We still live in the age of admin, but now it is in the form of data. Following Lewis, in the age of data, evil is computed and executed in the cloud, processed by racks of servers humming quietly in carefully cooled data centres.
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Heroin : Twitter/X ——— Methadone : Bluesky
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Common sense is certainly not the same as the average sense, or the most probable sense. It requires both a ‘common’ and ‘sense’. Increasingly we have neither.
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Taken from one of the draft chapters of the book manuscript I am working on:
Here one can ruefully observe the flattening of a Samuel Beckett quote, ‘Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better’, into a business meme that has been adopted by the Silicon Valley business class. Indeed, this mentality is precisely the approach adopted by OpenAI when it determined to release ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022, kickstarting an AI arms race. Capturing the mood, a top executive at Microsoft wrote to employees that ‘speed is even more important than ever’ and it would be ‘an absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.’ How to judge what can be fixed later? One gets the sense that what for-profit actors would place in this category are rather different from those concerned with social cohesion and wellbeing. OpenAI and the other tech firms now racing to release new AI models certainly have huge desire, that is definitely not something lacking. This is something Neil Postman identified and warned against:
‘The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers.’
Cultural risk takers, societal risk takers. To which we can add: cultural vandals, societal vandals. Such is the language we should be using.
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A few years ago I described LLMs as a ‘laser-guided missile aimed at the soft underbelly of neoliberal universities’. In retrospect, that was a considerable under-estimation. It completely breaks and shatters what little is left of these involuted institutions. Watching and experiencing this in realtime is deeply dispiriting.
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Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet:
People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it…
Everything alive.