Normally Caitlin writes about Israel and their policy capture of the West at the expense of our basic morals. This was a rare AI take of hers, but the imagery of it was so visceral I thought I’d share.
Quotation reads:
They’re encouraging us to spend our lives curled up in impotent little balls of emotional infancy and intellectual stagnation so that they can sell us machines which act as digital prostheses for the sacred parts of ourselves we have amputated. We mustn’t let them do this to us. We must remain human. We must hold fast to all those precious aspects of our humanity they’re trying to extract and commodify.
I don’t think the comparison with the industrial revolution is apt. The work that was replaced by automation back then was all repetitive, algorithmic work. It’s not as though before the fully automated loom was invented, that every new cloth that needed to be weaved was a new intellectual challenge. It required skill that took effort to obtain, but once you had it, it was mostly going through the motions. The problem with it was the fact that it was done in a way that it exclusively enriched and empowered the factory owners at the expense of the workers, not the automation itself.
AI is the opposite: it’s too unreliable, too inefficient, and you have too little control over it to be useful for high-volume, repetitive work, so it’s mostly used for bespoke work. It does a piss-poor job at that too, but if you lower your standards far enough, you can get away with a lot less thinking and decision-making than you would have to do otherwise. And that’s pretty much what these companies are trying to get us to do, lower our standards.