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Luddite
Regulating tech is hard, in part because computers can do so many things. This makes them useful but also complicated. Companies hide in that complexity, rendering undesirable behavior illegible to regulation: Regulating tech becomes regulating unlicensed taxis, mass surveillance, illegal hotels, social media, etc. If we actually want accountable tech, I argue that we should focus on the tech itself, not its downstream consequences. Here's my (non-environmental) case for rationing computation.
Until recently, platforms like Tinder and Uber couldn't exist. They need the intimate data that only mobile devices can provide, which they use to mediate human relationships. They never own anything. In some ways, this simplifies their task, because owning things is hard, but human activities are complicated, making them illegible to computers. As tech companies become more powerful and push deeper into our lives, here's a post about that tension and its consequences.
I've seen a few articles like this one from Futurism: "CEOs Could Easily Be Replaced With AI, Experts Argue." I totally get the appeal, but these articles are more anti-labor than anti-CEO. Because CEOs can't actually be disciplined with threats of automation, these articles further entrench an inherently anti-labor logic, telling readers that losing our livelihoods to automation is part of some natural order, rather than the result of political decisions that benefit capital.
Lots of skeptics are writing lots of good things about the AI hype, but so far, I've encountered relatively few attempts to explain why it's happening at all. Here's my contribution, mostly based Philp Agre's work on the (so-called) internet revolution, which focuses less on the capabilities of the tech itself, as most in mainstream did (and still do), but on the role of a new technology in the ever-present and continuous renegotiation of power within human institutions.
The video opens with Rober standing in front of a fancy-looking box, saying: >Hiding inside this box is an absolute marvel of engineering you might just find protecting you the next time you're at a public event that's got a lot of people. When he says "protecting you," the video momentarily cuts to stock footage of a packed sports stadium, the first of many "war on terror"-coded editorial decisions, before returning to the box, which opens and releases a drone. This is no ordinary drone, he says, but a particularly heavy and fast drone, designed to smash "bad guy drones trying to do bad guy things." He explains how "it's only a matter of time" before these bad guys' drones attack infrastructure "or worse," cutting to a photo of a stadium for the third time in just 30 seconds.
In "If We Burn," Vincent Bevins recaps the mass protests of the 2010s. He argues that they're communicative acts, but power has no way of negotiating with or interpreting them. They're "illegible." Here's a "yes and" to Bevins. I argue that social media companies have a detailed map of all protesters' connections, communications, topics of interests, locations, etc., such that, to them, there has never been a more legible form of social organization, giving them too much power over ostensibly leaderless movements. I also want to plug Bevins's book, independently of my post. It's extremely well researched. For many of the things that he describes, he was there, and he productively challenges many core values of the movements in which I and any others probably reading this have participated.
It seems this story is now going viral among "climate-skeptics" and the like. I learned about this because I got a google alert that organic search traffic to my [technological antisolutions post](theluddite.org/#!post/technological-antisolutions-revisited) is way up. Turns out the conspiracy theory crowd caught wind of the company Bill Gates invested in that is cutting down and burying trees to sell carbon credits, kodama.ai, which I wrote about in that post. They're obviously going nuts about it. These kinds of greenwashing schemes are functionally indistinguishable from climate denial, so it's really no surprise that people are confused and angry about it.
www.cnbc.com
The new Exxon carbon capture deal that Biden himself apparently helped broker is a perfect example. It checks all five of my criteria, but it really underscores the important of the fourth one: "It further entrenches existing power structures." Carbon capture only exists because it allows capitalists to profit off creating the problem and its "solution." Technological Antisolutions maximize GDP in the climate emergency. Original TA post: https://theluddite.org/#!post/technological-antisolutions-revisited
www.theverge.com
It is now possible to exist in a permanent state of professionalism, safe from registering the humanity of our remote colleagues or divulging our own. Everyone in a virtual meeting should be a perfectly smooth-faced professional inhabiting a blurred void. Anything less would be unprofessional. I hope they do voices next. We shouldn't be forced to listen to normal people's real voices in business meetings, especially women's, when we have the technology to do sexy voice filters.