"What if it’s not about AGI at all? ...What if it is all about who controls data and compute?" - absolutely, but why not both? That is, I do think that it is clearly about who controls data and compute; but I don't think that it's unmoored from the TESCREAL fantasy that Torres and Gebru describe, either, and AGI is central to that fantasy. It can be, and also I think is, a snake oil con at an epic scale - but that's tied to the data and compute part of the equation. You can't avoid the latter when you read Mark Andreessen say "A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero...Consumer cornucopia. Everything you want for pennies." Like, who believes that???? And yet that echoes the weird UBI fantasies I was already getting bombarded with in response to AI ethics critiques back in early 2023.
Good point Katie, it can be both. And while I don't like to personalise it, different techbros clearly come in at different points on the ideology-opportunism spectrum. The TESCREAL fantasy is a gift when it comes to the social theory of technology - it seems to me clearly an extension of cybernetics. But when I'm thinking about the economics of AI, i'm more interested in how cybernetics itself is an extension of free market thinking (Hayek was a fellow traveller). What links all of them is a belief that human beings are nodes or gates in the flow of capital/information/intelligence (choose your abstraction). Accelerating capital, or intelligence, requires accelerating human beings so that value is held up as little as possible in our messy bodies or non-information-optimised intellects, and the end point of that acceleration is to remove bodies entirely. So you get the fantasy of capital growth without human work, the fantasy of escaping the body entirely (for a few), the fantasy of floating free of the earth. As Bostrom strongly implies, death of the biologies that exist today is a small price to pay for the perfection of mind.
Fantastically put. And it makes me think anew about the difference between an STS understanding of assemblage and the very specific form of network you're describing here. Just dug out Andrew Cole's cranky response to network theory from a decade ago (The Function of Theory at the Present Time, PMLA, 2015) that seems oddly apt: "Networks, I admit, have a certain counterhegemonic, democratizing appeal. They are vast, interconnected in infinite ways, multinodal, decentralized, nonhierarchical and feature agency distributed to every actant, translation for every relation, and so on. … Multiplicities…exist only on the 'plane of consistency' (after Deleuze and Guattari), which means that they are even and smooth through and through. I'm not confident that these formulations help us think our uneven and troubled present. Rather, they seem to stylize it." I don't think he's right about how networks actually appear in much STS theory, though I do accept it as a critique of Haraway maybe; but he does describe the seduction of the kind of idealized network you descibe as emerging from cybernetics- the frictionless network. And as Caroline Levine says, "What a formalist analysis affords is an interest in the specificity of each form—what kind of network is it? What rules govern it?– and a grasp of what the affordance of each network can entail for other forms." (Forms, 2015, 119-20).
That’s so apt - must check it out. I’ve just done a symposium opener on the problems with posthumanism as a mode of critique; at least with
the flat ontology. I think I’m more interested in trying to differentiate kinds of relations or at least assert there are different kinds, rather than different networks. Join me for another podcast chat??
"What if it’s not about AGI at all? ...What if it is all about who controls data and compute?" - absolutely, but why not both? That is, I do think that it is clearly about who controls data and compute; but I don't think that it's unmoored from the TESCREAL fantasy that Torres and Gebru describe, either, and AGI is central to that fantasy. It can be, and also I think is, a snake oil con at an epic scale - but that's tied to the data and compute part of the equation. You can't avoid the latter when you read Mark Andreessen say "A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero...Consumer cornucopia. Everything you want for pennies." Like, who believes that???? And yet that echoes the weird UBI fantasies I was already getting bombarded with in response to AI ethics critiques back in early 2023.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-investor-goal-crash-human-wages
Good point Katie, it can be both. And while I don't like to personalise it, different techbros clearly come in at different points on the ideology-opportunism spectrum. The TESCREAL fantasy is a gift when it comes to the social theory of technology - it seems to me clearly an extension of cybernetics. But when I'm thinking about the economics of AI, i'm more interested in how cybernetics itself is an extension of free market thinking (Hayek was a fellow traveller). What links all of them is a belief that human beings are nodes or gates in the flow of capital/information/intelligence (choose your abstraction). Accelerating capital, or intelligence, requires accelerating human beings so that value is held up as little as possible in our messy bodies or non-information-optimised intellects, and the end point of that acceleration is to remove bodies entirely. So you get the fantasy of capital growth without human work, the fantasy of escaping the body entirely (for a few), the fantasy of floating free of the earth. As Bostrom strongly implies, death of the biologies that exist today is a small price to pay for the perfection of mind.
Fantastically put. And it makes me think anew about the difference between an STS understanding of assemblage and the very specific form of network you're describing here. Just dug out Andrew Cole's cranky response to network theory from a decade ago (The Function of Theory at the Present Time, PMLA, 2015) that seems oddly apt: "Networks, I admit, have a certain counterhegemonic, democratizing appeal. They are vast, interconnected in infinite ways, multinodal, decentralized, nonhierarchical and feature agency distributed to every actant, translation for every relation, and so on. … Multiplicities…exist only on the 'plane of consistency' (after Deleuze and Guattari), which means that they are even and smooth through and through. I'm not confident that these formulations help us think our uneven and troubled present. Rather, they seem to stylize it." I don't think he's right about how networks actually appear in much STS theory, though I do accept it as a critique of Haraway maybe; but he does describe the seduction of the kind of idealized network you descibe as emerging from cybernetics- the frictionless network. And as Caroline Levine says, "What a formalist analysis affords is an interest in the specificity of each form—what kind of network is it? What rules govern it?– and a grasp of what the affordance of each network can entail for other forms." (Forms, 2015, 119-20).
That’s so apt - must check it out. I’ve just done a symposium opener on the problems with posthumanism as a mode of critique; at least with
the flat ontology. I think I’m more interested in trying to differentiate kinds of relations or at least assert there are different kinds, rather than different networks. Join me for another podcast chat??
❤️