Notice how long it took J.D. Vance's owner, Peter Thiel to start answering the question that he'd like the human race to endure, and then the answer wasn't "Don't be stupdid, YES!" HE'S ABOUT TO BE THE POWER BEHIND THE EYE MAKEUP! If you needed any evidence that all of this, "AI," the legal framework that allows billionaire tech bros to buy our elections and so the country - and the US isn't the only one where that's true, the judiciary that is certain to protect them and not us.
I don't think there is anything except the Catholic Church that has any chance of helping us survive and defeat these billionaire oligarch crackpots and the sci-whores who work for them.
You know, in science fiction the threat is always the AI, or just the technology. It’s never the people behind the technology. The threat is never power made possible by money and access to politicians. But that’s always the reality. I’m not trying to gloss the Pope, just thinking about all those grim views of the future (which, in my childhood, sci-fi was supposed to be so good at, although it wasn’t) that never included the simple reality of who would own the factories (the great damage of the Industrial Revolution, which the Romantics never understood). Or, in this case, the data centers. The factories at least provided jobs (it took unions, and then government, to balance those scales). AI promises only to take them, and bluntly so. The advocates of AI at commencements told the graduates: “Fuck you. Get ready for it.” Why should we?
ReplyDeleteThank you for this👆. It is what the present time desperately needs.
Its less scary if you don't think about the role that human choices, human agency and humanly invented institutions, laws, habits, etc. play in humanly created catastrophes. Blake was right about prisons being built with stones of law, I'm not as confident about the brothels, though. I think those were built largely with laws, too.
DeleteMark Vernon did a recent program with Susanne Sklar going over William Blake's Jerusalem the Emanation Of The Giant Albion that got posted yesterday. I started listening to it after I ate lunch and, unfortunately, fell asleep during it. I'm going to listen to it again, standing up. I seem to have to stand up if I want to read or listen to something without falling asleep these days. I'll post a link to it in a new posting. I think of all the romantics, if he were reducible to that movement, he understood that the best. I find that I'm always going back to his "London." to understand the evil we are going through.