I see it as intrinsic to the reason the technology is being invested in and pushed into everything. Ai is wildly unmonetizable outside of data collection and replacing jobs
A similar but slightly different thing happened with crypto which once upon a time was about the idea of currency that didnt pass through a centralized controlling entities (the goverment, payment processors, etc) and thats still relevant today as we descend into authoritarianism and corporations censor legal businesses because they engage with sexuality. And yet crypto as a space and a technology is mired in abuse and exploitation- why?
Because its deeply profitable for harmful things (crime, scams, wealth transfer via a hollow investment vehicle). The good it can do is not the driving force behind it as an entity. That potentially even more true about ai given it is a commercial product built by massive companies at an enormous loss. And ai has the potential to have a much more profound impact on the world than crypto, rewriting deeply important social contracts in the image of corporate profit.
The human cultural norms around creating and sharing intellectual and artistic works that have been accepted foundations of human society are kind of being dissolved so that companies can take value from those works that they didn’t compensate anyone for.
I see where you are coming from, even if I don’t see a direct link between AI and hyper surveillance in your text. Personally I wager people will not only upload their holiday photos to the big corporate but share their most inner feelings with it, volunteerly…
And, like facebook did, they’ll create/generate “shadow persons” descriptors for people who are not using AI, by just using people around them.
On a side note, art cannot be made by machines, it’s intrinsic to the human mind, an expression of it. AI can rehash and redistribute it though, which is only bad for artists doing business (so that’s the downside, not excusing it but machines have done that like forever, again not excusing anything).
If we finally distributed some of the wealth automation generates we could all create art (and machines could even distribute it), but that’s dreamland for now of course.
Yeah, in a perfect world artists would not have to pay bills to survive, though I don’t know that thats really an art specific problem. If a company finds a novel way to exploit steel workers, that does happen within the backdrop of those people deserving to survive even if they can’t produce monetary value for someone else, but it feels a bit like it misses the immediate actionable harm, in favor of the less easily addressed bigger picture problem
But you’re not wrong, the underlying structural issue is people’s ability to survive being predicated on ones commercial viability, and the most commercially viable path is always rent seeking behavior and hiring people you will pay less than the ammount of value they create
With respect to surveillance, even in my limited usage I’ve shared a hugely valuable ammount of information from the perspective of understanding me as a consumer. Though, I do very much see a huge implication for regular old surveillance as well.
All companies in the us right now are operating within an environment where they need to kiss the ring, and where kissing the ring passionately enough can be competitively advantageous to them as a company, and beneficial to their bottom line. If the government comes knocking and asks an ai company to give them data, whether to create a case against a specific individual, or for access to ongoing usage activity/data sharing with federal agencies, they have very good reason to consider that course. And my understanding is that they are free to just say yes as long as their TOS doesnt preclude it.
Why do you think supercharged surveillance capitalism is intrinsic?
I see it as intrinsic to the reason the technology is being invested in and pushed into everything. Ai is wildly unmonetizable outside of data collection and replacing jobs
A similar but slightly different thing happened with crypto which once upon a time was about the idea of currency that didnt pass through a centralized controlling entities (the goverment, payment processors, etc) and thats still relevant today as we descend into authoritarianism and corporations censor legal businesses because they engage with sexuality. And yet crypto as a space and a technology is mired in abuse and exploitation- why?
Because its deeply profitable for harmful things (crime, scams, wealth transfer via a hollow investment vehicle). The good it can do is not the driving force behind it as an entity. That potentially even more true about ai given it is a commercial product built by massive companies at an enormous loss. And ai has the potential to have a much more profound impact on the world than crypto, rewriting deeply important social contracts in the image of corporate profit.
The human cultural norms around creating and sharing intellectual and artistic works that have been accepted foundations of human society are kind of being dissolved so that companies can take value from those works that they didn’t compensate anyone for.
I see where you are coming from, even if I don’t see a direct link between AI and hyper surveillance in your text. Personally I wager people will not only upload their holiday photos to the big corporate but share their most inner feelings with it, volunteerly…
And, like facebook did, they’ll create/generate “shadow persons” descriptors for people who are not using AI, by just using people around them.
On a side note, art cannot be made by machines, it’s intrinsic to the human mind, an expression of it. AI can rehash and redistribute it though, which is only bad for artists doing business (so that’s the downside, not excusing it but machines have done that like forever, again not excusing anything).
If we finally distributed some of the wealth automation generates we could all create art (and machines could even distribute it), but that’s dreamland for now of course.
Yeah, in a perfect world artists would not have to pay bills to survive, though I don’t know that thats really an art specific problem. If a company finds a novel way to exploit steel workers, that does happen within the backdrop of those people deserving to survive even if they can’t produce monetary value for someone else, but it feels a bit like it misses the immediate actionable harm, in favor of the less easily addressed bigger picture problem
But you’re not wrong, the underlying structural issue is people’s ability to survive being predicated on ones commercial viability, and the most commercially viable path is always rent seeking behavior and hiring people you will pay less than the ammount of value they create
With respect to surveillance, even in my limited usage I’ve shared a hugely valuable ammount of information from the perspective of understanding me as a consumer. Though, I do very much see a huge implication for regular old surveillance as well.
All companies in the us right now are operating within an environment where they need to kiss the ring, and where kissing the ring passionately enough can be competitively advantageous to them as a company, and beneficial to their bottom line. If the government comes knocking and asks an ai company to give them data, whether to create a case against a specific individual, or for access to ongoing usage activity/data sharing with federal agencies, they have very good reason to consider that course. And my understanding is that they are free to just say yes as long as their TOS doesnt preclude it.
(Sorry, I’m really long winded lol 😅)