Coming from a somewhat similar work background (engineering/tech/AI/behavioural manipulation at scale), one of the things we learnt to put up with was the increasing cognitive dissonance .. "tech as a force for (greater) good" when clearly the stuff we were doing was people manipulation (we did 2-3 million) via data manipulation to capture attention and spend... under the banner of "we're finding ways to use tech to help people get what they want". And any questioning being countered by the Moloch problem - we have to do it because everyone else is doing it. What is more terrifying is that once curious tech people (there's a few I know!) study anthropology, evolutionary biology and somatic communications, all the natural levers of manipulation suddenly show themselves, ready to be operated on by our technological tools ... and a million years of evolution make them incredibly hard to resist.
Very difficult for me to even start to watch this. Modernity is simply not sustainable. So to think that, somehow, we can solve the problems that technology have created, and make our global civilisation sustainable, by adding more technology seems to be sheer madness. If we don't ground ourselves in reality there is no possibility of us coming up with a plan to ease the transition down to a sustainable existence.
Problem-solving, story-telling, tool-making or whathaveyou, the drive towards creativity would seem to be congenital. Whether it precedes, runs-parallel to or (as, for instance, Kenneth Burke thought) results from the fundamental tool-making that is language, the drive involves some kind of very basic impulse to create in space-time, not just in mathematical terms what has been conceived.
KB argued that in that way the atomic bomb came to be not only conceptualized but built and deployed. As Heidegger and many others have noted, that is the way of technology in general. AI is no exception.
As the speakers here have noted, the problem with engineering is that the moral question, Should we? is often neglected, as is the post-construction question, How much is enough? We build it because we can. Restraint in engineering is first and foremost considered a matter of physics, not ethics.
Those ethical questions are certainly not new, and even Aristotle was upset with the way that monetization, the cash nexus, had taken over public thinking and social discourse, so that all values were increasingly understood not just in economic, but in monetary terms.
He had no solution to the problem and as today's dialogue makes clear, capitalist, socialist, communitarian, etc., we don't either. As Deep Dhillon said, the technological juggernaut is not likely to come to a good end unless globally we adopt a different moral outlook.
Ecological morality and moral economics are hardly on the radar in Tech Valley where dematerialization, post-humanism and money-power are in charge.
Lots to be said about this, but I would just point out on the "If everyone had adopted nuclear like France there'd be no climate crisis" - - - France actually has the same per capita CO2e of the UK. So that just isn't true.
I was about to listen to this podcast but if the immature argument that “nuclear could have saved us from climate change” is actually being made I am finding myself so enraged already I won’t. For anyone alive and engaged for the last at least 40 years, nuclear was, is and will forever be a stupid idea. Why? 1. No one knows what to do with deadly nuclear waste. 2. It is surreally costly from production to decommissioning, a cost paid by subsidies 3. Every nuclear power plant has the capacity to make plutonium (a waste product) and therefore nuclear bombs 4. They are huge terrorist targets 5. They are prone to massively deadly accidents 6. Check out our collective cancer rates.
AI is equally intellectually and morally stupid (pardon the French) as nukes always were.
The techno-optimism was strong with this one. I was wondering what would have happened if 20 years ago we had been given the choice “You can all have the power of a supercomputer in your pocket, but it will cause this amount of ecological destruction, and this amount of social upheaval, together with destroyed mental health and this many teenage suicides”…would we still have chosen it.
Even AI for medical solutions. If AI is to become a major driver of climate breakdown, which itself a health issue, is this a case of naive progress?
“would we still have chosen it”, yes because there would have been a lobby finding deniers sowing doubt about your stated negatives (which did come to pass) and guaranteeing the positives.
I recently read 'And if anybody comes and prescribes a “solution” then I suggest you run in the opposite direction from them.' Well, ok but I also see wisdom in Occams Razor : The simple answer is most often the best. Our solution may simply be.......women. They work in groups better than men. Studies have shown this. Earths problems stem, I believe, from an ideological shift away from matriarchy to patriarchy maybe 7000 years ago. I could expound - massively - but I think I'll just say : I have faith in matriarchs.
Given that only 20% of all global energy services are powered via electric grids, even if they were 100% nuclear we would still be facing serious climate change. Might have helped a little, but just as likely more expensive nuclear would have seen substitution away from grid to fossil powered energy services. Nuke and tech bros can seem alluring, but are as often as not quite snake oily.
Nice debate with Deep. Thanks! I liked how Rachel acknowledged that having an AI algorithm that can help quickly interpret multiple test results to determine if a severe stroke is happening or not would be useful. And... Where is all the electricity for this coming from? Have y'all heard that Microsoft's desire for massive electric capacity is causing Pennsylvania to plan to reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant which suffered a partial meltdown decades ago? This ravenous creature IS the windigoo beast that Winona LaDuke and Robin Wall Kimmerer talk about, the selfish insatiable consuming monster. It never stops regardless of consequences.
Also, though I like Deep's copacetic demeanor and measured approach to applying AI, I disagreed with his assessment that having technology do most daily task work for us would be a good thing. He did admit that overall tech implementation is not exactly his expertise, and so I raise a read flag on, "where will food come from?" Combine that with my previous paragraph and I wonder... how do you acquiesce to high tech when the byproducts and waste threaten our food supply?
Finally, I think our quality of life is WORSE when tech does our jobs. I LOVE processing fruit when around other people. I LOVE grinding this year's mint purchase from the farmer's market in a mortar and pestle with my kid, cuz we smell the stuff, and we talk. No devices, maybe music the background. It is human time spent doing human things. that's the world I wanna live in. We tell stories around the kitchen table preparing food, in the shop repairing broken shit. This is why people live longer in the Blue Zones, cuz they physically do shit... together. Hey Rachel, what about an interview with a Blue Zone expert? :-) We are in a period of diminishing returns. Tech is no longer improving our lives. Our quality of life (within industrialized countries) is decreasing with the advance of tech. My new microwave broke. Shit! I'm done. I love the convenience of microwaves, but I'm done feeding the beast. I'm going back to reheating leftovers in a pot like I used to.
Coming from a somewhat similar work background (engineering/tech/AI/behavioural manipulation at scale), one of the things we learnt to put up with was the increasing cognitive dissonance .. "tech as a force for (greater) good" when clearly the stuff we were doing was people manipulation (we did 2-3 million) via data manipulation to capture attention and spend... under the banner of "we're finding ways to use tech to help people get what they want". And any questioning being countered by the Moloch problem - we have to do it because everyone else is doing it. What is more terrifying is that once curious tech people (there's a few I know!) study anthropology, evolutionary biology and somatic communications, all the natural levers of manipulation suddenly show themselves, ready to be operated on by our technological tools ... and a million years of evolution make them incredibly hard to resist.
Very difficult for me to even start to watch this. Modernity is simply not sustainable. So to think that, somehow, we can solve the problems that technology have created, and make our global civilisation sustainable, by adding more technology seems to be sheer madness. If we don't ground ourselves in reality there is no possibility of us coming up with a plan to ease the transition down to a sustainable existence.
Yeah, I second that ... extremely difficult to watch.
Problem-solving, story-telling, tool-making or whathaveyou, the drive towards creativity would seem to be congenital. Whether it precedes, runs-parallel to or (as, for instance, Kenneth Burke thought) results from the fundamental tool-making that is language, the drive involves some kind of very basic impulse to create in space-time, not just in mathematical terms what has been conceived.
KB argued that in that way the atomic bomb came to be not only conceptualized but built and deployed. As Heidegger and many others have noted, that is the way of technology in general. AI is no exception.
As the speakers here have noted, the problem with engineering is that the moral question, Should we? is often neglected, as is the post-construction question, How much is enough? We build it because we can. Restraint in engineering is first and foremost considered a matter of physics, not ethics.
Those ethical questions are certainly not new, and even Aristotle was upset with the way that monetization, the cash nexus, had taken over public thinking and social discourse, so that all values were increasingly understood not just in economic, but in monetary terms.
He had no solution to the problem and as today's dialogue makes clear, capitalist, socialist, communitarian, etc., we don't either. As Deep Dhillon said, the technological juggernaut is not likely to come to a good end unless globally we adopt a different moral outlook.
Ecological morality and moral economics are hardly on the radar in Tech Valley where dematerialization, post-humanism and money-power are in charge.
Lots to be said about this, but I would just point out on the "If everyone had adopted nuclear like France there'd be no climate crisis" - - - France actually has the same per capita CO2e of the UK. So that just isn't true.
I was about to listen to this podcast but if the immature argument that “nuclear could have saved us from climate change” is actually being made I am finding myself so enraged already I won’t. For anyone alive and engaged for the last at least 40 years, nuclear was, is and will forever be a stupid idea. Why? 1. No one knows what to do with deadly nuclear waste. 2. It is surreally costly from production to decommissioning, a cost paid by subsidies 3. Every nuclear power plant has the capacity to make plutonium (a waste product) and therefore nuclear bombs 4. They are huge terrorist targets 5. They are prone to massively deadly accidents 6. Check out our collective cancer rates.
AI is equally intellectually and morally stupid (pardon the French) as nukes always were.
#whatiswrongwithsomepeople
It's only a throwaway comment so still safe for you to listen I reckon. :)
Hahaha. Maybe. I think I might postpone for another time. Thanks though
The techno-optimism was strong with this one. I was wondering what would have happened if 20 years ago we had been given the choice “You can all have the power of a supercomputer in your pocket, but it will cause this amount of ecological destruction, and this amount of social upheaval, together with destroyed mental health and this many teenage suicides”…would we still have chosen it.
Even AI for medical solutions. If AI is to become a major driver of climate breakdown, which itself a health issue, is this a case of naive progress?
“would we still have chosen it”, yes because there would have been a lobby finding deniers sowing doubt about your stated negatives (which did come to pass) and guaranteeing the positives.
I recently read 'And if anybody comes and prescribes a “solution” then I suggest you run in the opposite direction from them.' Well, ok but I also see wisdom in Occams Razor : The simple answer is most often the best. Our solution may simply be.......women. They work in groups better than men. Studies have shown this. Earths problems stem, I believe, from an ideological shift away from matriarchy to patriarchy maybe 7000 years ago. I could expound - massively - but I think I'll just say : I have faith in matriarchs.
Given that only 20% of all global energy services are powered via electric grids, even if they were 100% nuclear we would still be facing serious climate change. Might have helped a little, but just as likely more expensive nuclear would have seen substitution away from grid to fossil powered energy services. Nuke and tech bros can seem alluring, but are as often as not quite snake oily.
Nice debate with Deep. Thanks! I liked how Rachel acknowledged that having an AI algorithm that can help quickly interpret multiple test results to determine if a severe stroke is happening or not would be useful. And... Where is all the electricity for this coming from? Have y'all heard that Microsoft's desire for massive electric capacity is causing Pennsylvania to plan to reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant which suffered a partial meltdown decades ago? This ravenous creature IS the windigoo beast that Winona LaDuke and Robin Wall Kimmerer talk about, the selfish insatiable consuming monster. It never stops regardless of consequences.
Also, though I like Deep's copacetic demeanor and measured approach to applying AI, I disagreed with his assessment that having technology do most daily task work for us would be a good thing. He did admit that overall tech implementation is not exactly his expertise, and so I raise a read flag on, "where will food come from?" Combine that with my previous paragraph and I wonder... how do you acquiesce to high tech when the byproducts and waste threaten our food supply?
Finally, I think our quality of life is WORSE when tech does our jobs. I LOVE processing fruit when around other people. I LOVE grinding this year's mint purchase from the farmer's market in a mortar and pestle with my kid, cuz we smell the stuff, and we talk. No devices, maybe music the background. It is human time spent doing human things. that's the world I wanna live in. We tell stories around the kitchen table preparing food, in the shop repairing broken shit. This is why people live longer in the Blue Zones, cuz they physically do shit... together. Hey Rachel, what about an interview with a Blue Zone expert? :-) We are in a period of diminishing returns. Tech is no longer improving our lives. Our quality of life (within industrialized countries) is decreasing with the advance of tech. My new microwave broke. Shit! I'm done. I love the convenience of microwaves, but I'm done feeding the beast. I'm going back to reheating leftovers in a pot like I used to.
If there is any issue that is making me feel like I live in a dystopian autocratic dictatorship it is the spread of AI
This is bloody long, but profoundly related...? Even a skim gives a pretty good idea...?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/