AI is about power, not technology ⊗ AI’s hidden impact on human thought ⊗ Companies creating food out of thin air

The problem with AI is about power, not technology

In this article for Jacobin, Jason Resnikoff argues that the real issue with AI is not its technological advancements, but rather how it is wielded by employers to degrade labour conditions and undermine worker power. Instead of eliminating jobs, AI tends to break skilled work into lower-paid, semiskilled tasks while obscuring the human labour behind technological interfaces, often involving poorly paid workers in the Global South—something we called “jobs below the API” for a little while early in the gig economy, pre-AI. This story of technological progress has historically made it difficult for workers to criticise the changes to their means of production, as employers use terms like “AI” to perpetuate outdated methods of labour degradation. Basically, the discussion around AI reflects a long-standing narrative that positions technological progress as an inevitable benefit, obscuring the reality of its impact on the workforce.

Great piece. One small nitpick is one I’ve mentioned a few times. I’ve got it tagged as “structural orientation” in my notes but it doesn’t seem to be a term used elsewhere in this context. It’s this habit that some critics of tech have of making it sound like there’s an evil conspiracy, where really it’s “just” multiple actors optimising for the same incentives. Critics are still right about the results… it’s just not a conspiracy.

Strangely, it also reminds me of governments seeing public transport as an expense instead of an investment. You can invest in people you work with/who work for you, you can invest in public transport, or you can view both as just expenses and try to cut budgets to the bone, crippling how the systems works, reducing quality, and removing all fun and richness out of it.

Contemporary use of the term AI, however, tends toward black-box discussions of material changes, mystifying the technology in question while also homogenizing many distinct technologies into a single revolutionary mechanism — a deus ex machina that is monolithic and obscure. […]

Digital platforms have allowed employers to extend factory logic practically anywhere. Here, we can see the most “revolutionary” aspect of the technological changes referred to as AI: the mass diffusion of worker surveillance. […]

Workers over the better part of the past century, like most members of the general public, have had a great deal of difficulty talking about changes to the means of production outside the terms of technological progress, and that has played overwhelmingly to the advantage of employers. […]

Workers have reason to fear AI, but not because it is in and of itself revolutionary. Rather, workers and organizers should worry because the idea of AI allows employers to pursue some of the oldest methods of industrial labor degradation.

Mechanized minds: AI’s hidden impact on human thought

Shai Tubali, “a philosopher and researcher specializing in the philosophy of religion, consciousness studies, and artificial intelligence,” takes us through some of the thinking of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Way back in the 80s, he raised concerns that machines may one day take over cognitive tasks, prompting us to reflect on our own mental processes. Krishnamurti suggested that the critical issue wouldn’t be whether AI can become conscious, but whether humans can cultivate intelligence beyond predictable, machine-like thought patterns.

He argues that true intelligence transcends mechanical thought, urging us to cultivate deeper self-awareness and independent thinking. Ultimately, the challenge is about humans striving to outgrow the artificial intelligence within themselves and resisting the temptation of an entertained mind.

Paraphrasing Bridle in the next issue; AI is bringing a rethinking of what it means to be human, what we are “good for,” at exactly the same time as another rethinking is happening, this one about our place in the world, among other species and amidst crumbling ecosystems. Fun times.

If machines can rapidly weave together complex ideas from diverse schools of thought to uncover conceptual connections, would this type of academic activity still be deemed intelligent, and will the knowledge we’re boasting to have — our prideful capacity to activate our brain’s net of associations and comparisons — retain any significance? […]

To him, meeting it meant doing everything we could to make our minds different from artificial intelligence — a call to rise above the routines that risk turning us into reflections of our own machines. […]

As smart machines and robots take over more of our thinking, the brain risks becoming lazy, unstimulated, and, frankly, bored. In a world where work and struggle are things of the past, our experiences might dwindle to nothing more than a search for entertainment and pleasure — a cycle of reacting to one shiny distraction after another. […]

Though it may feel uncomfortable, Krishnamurti sees this recognition as essential: Understanding the machine-like quality of thought, he says, is the “very source of intelligence,” the spark of a unique, deeper awareness.

These companies are creating food out of thin air

Claire L. Evans for the MIT Technology Review, looking at “a new crop of biotech startups [that], armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us they say they can make food out of thin air.” I’m pretty fascinated with all new materials as well as synthetic biology in general, although I’ve so far spent very little time diving into those topics. I just keep track of signals in the field. Evans follows it much more deeply and this whole idea of protein out of carbon sounds seems to have quite a bit of potential.

In the lab, they do the same, eating up waste carbon and reproducing so enthusiastically that their populations swell to fill massive fermentation tanks. Siphoned off and dehydrated, that bacterial biomass becomes a protein-rich powder that’s chock-full of nutrients and essentially infinitely renewable. […]

In sterile bioreactors similar to the fermentation vats used in the brewing industry, the bacteria flourish in water on a steady diet of CO2, hydrogen, and a few additional nutrients, like nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. As they multiply, the bacteria thicken the water into a slurry, which is continuously siphoned off and dehydrated, creating a protein-rich powder that can be used as an ingredient in alternative meats, dairy products, and snacks. […]

Rather than coaxing microorganisms to produce the animal-derived proteins we’re already familiar with, companies like Air Protein and Solar Foods are proposing that we skip the intermediary and simply eat the microbes themselves, dried into a powder. Microbial biomass made with these new fermentation technologies is fibrous, vitamin-rich, and versatile.

§ L.M. Sacasas notes Robin Sloan’s word for “arresting phrases or quotations;” “amulets” and goes on to provide eight more of his own. Lovely amulets but it makes for an summarisable post, hence its presence here instead of above, but definitely worth a read. “Such phrases or fragments, Sloan suggested, were charged with a certain power. Like an amulet worn around the neck, these words might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart.” Also, I thought it had just too good a semantic connection to Jay’s enchanted Knowledge Objects and talismans to pass up (shared last week).

§ Great conference talk by Nick Foster, On Distortion. He connects the imperfection of electronic musical devices to that of LLMs. It’s well explained, shows the importance of those “mistakes,” and the slides are beautiful. And: “A lot of my job in working with these types of techniques is to think beyond what it is or what it might be or even what it does and try to think a bit more about what it might mean.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Build your own commissioner. Niiiice! Smithery, “in collaboration with the School of International Futures and Future Friends, have been working on a framework and workshop approach to help find a practical way to start enacting the Declaration for Future Generations.”
• 2024 Future Perfect 50: Vox names its list of thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are changing the world. Loads of great smart people on there, including the frequently featured here Deb Chachra and L.M. Sacasas.

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Liquid AI is redesigning the neural network. Fascinating. “The design makes the network more efficient and more flexible, allowing it to learn even after training, unlike a conventional neural network.”
• Chinese company trained GPT-4 rival with just 2,000 GPUs — 01.ai spent $3M compared to OpenAI's $80M to $100M. Constraints breed creativity. “01.ai focused on reducing the bottlenecks in its inference process by turning computational demands into memory-oriented tasks, building a multi-layer caching system, and designing a specialized inference engine to optimize speed and resource allocation.”
• AI cloning of celebrity voices outpacing the law, experts warn. “Experts have warned that voice-cloning is outpacing the law as technologists hone previously clunky voice generators into models capable of emulating the subtlest pauses and breathing of human intonation.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Scientists find new textbook case of human-driven evolution. “The removal of forests since humans arrived has removed the poisonous species. As a result, in deforested regions the mimicking species has abandoned this strategy – as there is nothing to mimic.”
• World’s 1.5C climate target ‘deader than a doornail’, experts say. “We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”

Asides

• Mushroom color atlas. “Explore the chromatic universe of fungi through the spectrum of colors naturally produced by dye mushrooms.”
• The most spectacular images from Juno’s latest close flyby of Jupiter. “While NASA processes many photos from the Juno mission, community editors are a significant part of the photography efforts, and the latest community submissions are incredible.” A bit heavy on the HDR but trippy.
• “If you need a refresher, here’s the official 2-minute recap of Severance season one.” (Via Kottke.)