Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
New piece from Baldur Bjarnason: AI and Esoteric Fascism, which focuses heavily on our very good friends and their link to AI as a whole. Ending quote's pretty solid, so I'm dropping it here:
Anyways, here's my personal sidenote:
As I've mentioned a bajillion times before, I've predicted this AI bubble would kill AI as a concept, as its myriad harms and failures indelibly associate AI with glue pizzas, artists getting screwed, and other such awful things. After reading through this, its clear I've failed to take into account the political elements of this bubble, and how it'd affect things.
My main prediction hasn't changed - I still expect AI as a concept to die once this bubble bursts - but I suspect that AI as a concept will be treated as an inherently fascist concept, and any attempts to revive it will face active ridicule, if not outright hostility.
Well, how do you feel about robotics?
On one hand, I fully agree with you. AI is a rebranding of cybernetics, and both fields are fundamentally inseparable from robotics. The goal of robotics is to create artificial slaves who will labor without wages or solidarity. We're all ethically obliged to question the way that robots affect our lives.
On the other hand, machine learning (ML) isn't going anywhere. In my oversimplification of history, ML was originally developed by Markov and Shannon to make chatbots and predict the weather; we still want to predict the weather, so even a complete death of the chatbot industry won't kill ML. Similarly, some robotics and cybernetics research is still useful even when not applied to replacing humans; robotics is where we learned to apply kinematics, and cybernetics gave us the concept of a massive system that we only partially see and interact with, leading to systems theory.
Here's the kicker: at the end of the day, most people will straight-up refuse to grok that robotics is about slavery. They'll usually refuse to even examine the etymology, let alone the history of dozens of sci-fi authors exploring how robots are slaves or the reality today of robots serving humans in a variety of scenarios. They fundamentally don't see that humans are aggressively chauvinist and exceptionalist in their conception of work and labor. It's a painful and slow conversation just to get them to see the word
robota.Good food for thought, but a lot of that rubs me the wrong way. Slaves are people, machines are not. Slaves are capable of suffering, machines are not. Slaves are robbed of agency they would have if not enslaved, machines would not have agency either way. In a science fiction world with humanlike artificial intelligence the distinction would be more muddled, but back in this reality equivocating between robotics and slavery while ignoring these very important distinctions is just sophistry. Call it chauvinism and exceptionalism all you want, but I think the rights of a farmhand are more important than the rights of a tractor.
It's not that robotics is morally uncomplicated. Luddites had a point. Many people choose to work even in dangerous, painful, degrading or otherwise harmful jobs, because the alternative is poverty. To mechanize such work would reduce immediate harm from the nature of the work itself, but cause indirect harm if the workers are left without income. Overconsumption goes hand in hand with overproduction and automation can increase the production of things that are ultimately harmful. Mechanization has frequently lead to centralization of wealth by giving one party an insurmountable competitive advantage over its competition.
One could take the position that the desire to have work performed for the lowest cost possible is in itself immoral, but that would need some elaboration as well. It's true that automation benefits capital by removing workers' needs from the equation, but it's bad reductionism to call that its only purpose. Is the goal of PPE just to make workers complain less about injuries? I bought a dishwasher recently. Did I do it in order to not pay myself wages or have solidarity for myself when washing dishes by hand?
The etymology part is not convincing either. Would it really make a material difference if more people called them "automata" or something? Čapek chose to name the artificial humanoid workers in his play after an archaic Czech word for serfdom and it caught on. It's interesting trivia, but it's not particularly telling specifically because most people don't know the etymology of the term. The point would be a lot stronger if we called it "slavetronics" or "indenture engineering" instead of robotics. You say cybernetics is inseparable from robotics but I don't see how steering a ship is related to feudalist mode of agricultural production.