theluddite

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[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Dan McQuillan has been warning about this since forever, to the point where I would've assumed that he'd be referenced if not interviewed int his article, though he wasn't. Here's a pretty short one from him. His basic argument is that AI is best understood as algorithmic Thatcherism, in which they'll silicon-wash the same austerity politics that neoliberalism has been feeding us forever.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Sounds very doable! My friend has an old claw foot tub that he lights a fire under. If you want something a little less country, you can buy on demand electric or propane water heaters and hook your hose up, though I'd expect the electric one wouldn't be able to keep up at 120v. Hardest part of this project is probably moving the tub. I say go for it!

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 months ago

I would love to read an actually serious treatment of this issue and not 4 paragraphs that just say the headline but with more words.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 28 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can't change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks "I wonder what happens then," and while I'm sure that there's a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 28 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I know that this kind of actually critical perspective isn't point of this article, but software always reflects the ideology of the power structure in which it was built. I actually covered something very similar in my most recent post, where I applied Philip Agre's analysis of the so-called Internet Revolution to the AI hype, but you can find many similar analyses all over STS literature, or throughout just Agre's work, which really ought to be required reading for anyone in software.

edit to add some recommendations: If you think of yourself as a tech person, and don't necessarily get or enjoy the humanities (for lack of a better word), I recommend starting here, where Agre discusses his own "critical awakening."

As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial -- except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own -- that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). T

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 months ago

Oh damn good to know. I do a lot of work with one of the UCs. We were happy to stop work during the grad student strike a few years ago and we'll be happy to do it again. Thanks for posting!

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It's right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site's perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it's certainly a very specific one, and one that I don't particularly care for.

Even "the rot economy," which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it's just lacking in a theory beyond "there are some shitty people being shitty."

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 40 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I wish we had less selection, in general. My family lives in Spain, and I've also lived in France. This is just my observation, but American grocery stores clearly emphasize always having a consistent variety, whereas my Spanish family expects to eat higher quality produce seasonally. I suspect that this is a symptom of a wider problem, not the cause, but American groceries are just fucking awful by comparison, and so much more expensive too.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Excellent thank you very much for this.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 months ago

So true! I hereby retract that antizombo slander

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 22 points 6 months ago (12 children)

https://puginarug.com/

https://zombo.com/

https://www.yyyyyyy.info/

I like single purpose concept websites that don't do anything. They're the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you're always glad that they're there.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 26 points 6 months ago

I've already posted this here, but it's just perennially relevant: The Anti-Labor Propaganda Masquerading as Science.

 

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 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.

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