DegrowthUKLooks interesting. A week-long session in Latvia.
Circle 9: Degrowth and Exnovation – NORDIC SUMMER UNIVERSITY
https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-9-degrowth-and-exnovation/
stibHas anyone noticed that image captchas will often accept incorrect answers? I've been trying to do my bit for the Resistance by just clicking randomly on them until I get bored, whereas previously I used to sweat about whether the one pixel of traffic light in a particular square was counted or not. I guess the algorithm decides a right answer is one that falls within a certain standard deviation from the mean results.
TL;DR you can be super sloppy with those annoying bois.
#ShowerThoughts #MyHobby #neoLuddism
TL;DR you can be super sloppy with those annoying bois.
#ShowerThoughts #MyHobby #neoLuddism
ThomasRE: https://toot.community/@yvanspijk/116115090523828826
Acrobat reader offered an "AI summary" of an etymological dictionary. It made it crash.
Ah, that gives me ideas 😉
💀 𝓕airchild 💀"Robots are not threatening your job. Gig app executives who sense an opportunity to evade regulations and exploit tradition-bound industries are threatening your job. Business-to-business salesmen promising AI content and automation solutions to executives are threatening your job.
Robots are not killing jobs. Managers who see a cost benefit to replacing a human role with an algorithmic one, and who choose to make the switch, are killing jobs.
Robots are not coming for your job. The CEOs who see an opportunity to reap greater profits in machines that will make back their investment in 3.7 years, and who send the savings upstream—they’re the ones coming for your job."
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
"Here’s a telling example: In 2019, the New York Times’ Kevin Roose filed a report from Davos detailing how the business leaders and tech CEOs at that year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) were very eager to implement automation.
“They’ll never admit it in public,” Roose wrote, “but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.” In public, the elites preferred to discuss the abstract need to prepare for “the fourth industrial revolution” or “the second machine age.” In private, they were more direct. “People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of the automation firm Infosys, who worked with those very people; the leaders of major companies and organizations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?”
Since then, these executives and elites have decided to buy and build more robots and software programs that would, ideally, put people out of work. Far from spontaneously swarming to the factory floor, the AI and robot armies that are “coming for your jobs” are much more likely to be deployed on behalf of the kind of elites who go to Davos.
...
Other reports about the rise of the robots are more like self-fulfilling prophecies: In 2023, a Goldman Sachs study estimated that 300 million jobs worldwide were at risk of being taken over by generative AI systems—suggesting to those in a position to purchase such technology that it was high time to do so...
... These dramatic-sounding reports find a synchronicity in the media’s penchant for dramatizing science-fiction tropes apparently come to life, and voilà—the robots are coming. We will be able to make better decisions about automation, however, if we understand that, in practice, “the robots are coming for our jobs” usually means something more like “a CEO wants to cut his operating budget by 15 percent and was just pitched on enterprise software that promises to do all the work currently done by thirty employees in accounts payable.”
...
"
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
"If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are...
Since the Luddites’ day, when this question was phrased as the “machinery question,” and not the “factory-owner question,” it has historically helped mask the agency behind the decision to automate jobs. This decision is not made by robots, but by business owners, by entrepreneurs, by management. It is a decision most often made with the intention of saving money by reducing human labor costs (though it is also made in the interests of bolstering efficiency and improving operations and safety). It is a human decision that triggers the disruption...
These executives and managers may feel as if they have no choice, with shareholders and boards and bosses of their own to answer to, and a system that incentivizes the making of these decisions—but they are exactly that: decisions, made by people. Pretending otherwise, that robots are inevitable, is technological determinism and leads to a dearth in critical thinking about when and how automation is best implemented.
The Luddites knew exactly who owned the machinery they destroyed. They saw that automation is not a faceless phenomenon that we must submit to. And they were right: Automation is, quite often and quite simply, a matter of the executive classes locating new ways to enrich themselves, not unlike the factory bosses of the Luddite days."
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
'Where were you radicalized?'
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant (his website is https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/).
As a burgeoning neo-Luddite I am ashamed at my part in the rise of Uber. I am ashamed at my part in the rise of the cashierless checkout. I am ashamed at my part in the all-consuming behemoth that is Amazon. Of the super-corporations like Amazon and Google (and yes, Apple) which control our lives. And my part, no matter how small, in the rise of GAI.
Read. This. Book. Right. Now.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/
LostSettler@oldclumsy_nowmad so the solution is to use more power and water to negate the power and water hungry thing?
Why not license and legislate it? Or license and legislate power consumption?
Social movement to say no to AI. #neoluddism #humanFirst
Miguel Afonso Caetano"More than two-thirds of residents agreed in a 2024 poll that the tech companies have partially or completely misplaced their moral compass. And that was before so many in tech embraced the Trump administration.
Some of those who believe tech lost its way are finding explanations in a book published a quarter century ago.
Paulina Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” saw the seeds of disaster in the late-1990s dot-com boom, which, she argued, transformed a community that was previously sober, civic-minded and egalitarian into something toxic.
Silicon Valley, Ms. Borsook wrote, hated governments, rules and regulations. It believed if you were rich, you were smart. It thought people could be, and indeed should be, programmed just like a computer. “Techno-libertarianism,” as she labeled it, had no time for the messy realities of being human.
At the time, Silicon Valley was just a bunch of young people boasting and hyping. But Ms. Borsook predicted that when the tech world had amassed sufficient money and power, it would start imposing its beliefs on everyone outside the valley.
“If empathy has now become a distasteful personal failing; if surveillance capitalism has become the default shrugged-off business practice; if the environmental impacts of A.I. are waved away: then we are alas living in the tech-driven culture I saw headed our way 30 years ago,” Ms. Borsook said in an interview. “It’s terrible that I was right.”"
#SiliconValley #TechnoLibertarianism #CalifornianIdeology #Neoluddism
"Just because AI could replace humans doesn’t mean it will. Few of the companies announcing layoffs actually cite AI as the reason. Relative to the investments of AI companies, actual corporate adoption has been modest, feeding suspicions of a bubble.
So does it matter that people don’t love AI? It might. Nuclear power once offered the sort of potential that AI promises today. But the public never got comfortable with a technology that could also wipe out humanity, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 to 1990, polls showed overwhelming opposition to new reactors, and deployment ground to halt. Only now is it coming back to life—ironically, to power AI.
Today, AI has the political wind at its back. One of President Trump’s first acts was to rescind former President Joe Biden’s AI safety guidelines. He now gives priority to dismantling regulatory barriers to AI and competing with China.
But those winds can shift. A poll of roughly 2,000 people by Narrative Strategies, a communications and public relations firm, found just 40% said the AI industry could be “trusted to do the right thing,” well below the 62% to 63% who said that about finance, energy or healthcare. Asked about government regulation, 57% said tech and AI needed more, well above other industries.
AI evangelists believe its sheer economic and computational force make it unstoppable. They better hope so, because it certainly isn’t going to succeed on its popularity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #USA #NeoLuddism #MassUnemployment