Gregory's ServerAI is \*not\* just a tool. It is a pea and thimble game in which a few, very rich people steal our entire cultural and intellectual history, and use it in a way that forever depletes it. It is a way of enclosing the commons. And it's taking us all, the demos, too long to get our collective heads around it because, like the climate, it is so strange to think of it being steal-able that the idea doesn't stick, it doesn't have language to describe and discuss it. 1/3 #AI
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None of us can take our little share of the air and say, no, you're not allowed to run this through your private jet and spit out the polluted, depleted remains. And it's the same with our cultural heritage. To me it's akin to the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, or Rio Tinto and Juukan Gorge, or Exxon and climate. 3/3   @lindawoodrow yes, AI could be the biggest land grab in history. Big tech is like a data-hungry Pacman. Nom nom nom nom... But it's OK, you can rent your knowledge back from them. @patrickleavy In Cory Doctorow's enshittification scenario, you can't even do that. By the time they've run it through their commodification machine, it's so scrambled with information pollution that it's worthless. It would be like trying to round up all the microplastics . @lindawoodrow @patrickleavy I spend much of my working life trying to get organisations to improve #dataquality. In many organisations Garbage In, Garbage Out has quietly become Garbage In, Gospel Out. Same lousy data, same poor outputs but they are now implicitly believed as they came from whatever shiny new system the organisation has implemented.  @lindawoodrow your post has helped me see that it has the same dynamics as this metaphor 👉 https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113107865455294213 What Ted Chiang last year characterised as the “blurry JPEG of the web” problem is just a subset of the *ever-thinning gruel for dinner* problem 😞 @urlyman Thank you for this link! I subscribe to Zero Input Agriculture, Shane Simonsen's blog, but I hadn't come across this podcast. Some wonderfully profound ideas in there. @lindawoodrow I strongly agree. There are various analyses of this in the literature. The one which resonates most strongly for me is ‘technofeudelism’ (Yanis Varafoukis), worth a read. @GreenerFutures I have a Yanis Varafoukis's book in my to-read pile, which is sadly very big. It has now moved closer to the top. |
We are in the same kind of situation as First Nations people being offered beads for land, and not actually comprehending the terms of the deal because the idea of country being privatised was too, too wierd to comprehend. There is a huge and accelerating cultural shift going on, in which \*everything\* we have thought of as natural, given, the water we swim in, is being taken, used, turned into private wealth. 2/3