Sin VegaJun 12, 2025
all this automated incompetence shit makes me think of my jobs that on paper were "stamp the form/enter the data from x to y", but in practice quickly became "be the person who tries to understand the problem and solve it"
Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025

tied into this is a thought I've nearly posted many times: the reason Automated Incompetence is proving popular with some people is the same reason I call it that.

"It just spews out gibberish that looks vaguely like it's true because it's similar to everything else" describes what a great number of people have spent most of their work time doing for decades. Of course they're using the thing that removes what little thought they were putting in already. It really doesn't change much

Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025
the main difference is that when they cause problems by doing this, they now get to blame "the ai" instead of policy. And that it's easier than ever to dismiss and fob off the people who made up 90% of those I helped in several admin jobs
Show threadSin Vega

Even before the cult of The Algorithm poisoned everything and everyone, I'd already long since taken up the standard approach of dealing with any bureaucracy: you have to keep trying until you find the one person working there who remembers what the organisation is supposed to do, is clever enough to listen to what you're actually sying, and cares enough about people to try.

Automated Incompetence will add another layer you have to break through before you can even start doing that.

Jun 12, 2025 at 11:40amWeb
Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025
That's its purpose. Everyone using "AI" for most of the things it's being sold for is incompetent by definition. Corporations are happy to use it to "save" money (ie the immediate bottom line for today, who cares about tomorrow when you can just asset strip the place you've wrecked anyway), and public services under neoliberalism love anything that protects them from having to help anyone
Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025

A lot of authoritarian regimes don't actually have strict laws. They effectively have no laws. A populace that is never sure whether they're safe serves the regime better than clarity.

Their whim is law, not any fixed rule or statement. It's what the US dictator is doing and what the kid starver wants for the uk. Uncertainty, confusion, lack of confidence all point towards deference to the nearest authority. The ideal one being mindless software that infinitely generates meaningless gibberish

Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025

Mil Millington did a gag that "China doesn't have any laws, it just has whatever's politically expedient that afternoon."

Noah Gervais said a while back that "computers are the perfect citizens under fascism" and yeah. The goal was never competence, never to help anyone, never to do anything specific. Just remove all compassion, any need for the wealthy and powerful to give away the tiniest crumb even if it's already a profitable trade. Replace both with mindless tools that do nothing

Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025

I'm not even joking that the "ai" shit is a natural extension of britain inventing concentration camps and hitler the gas chambers. Even shitty people trained to kill can find that shooting endless civilians fucks their morale. Better to put them in a camp so circumstance, not you, kills them. Better a guy has "I just closed some doors", "I just pulled a lever" than "I shot them one by one"

I didn't deprive those people of medicine. It was the "intelligent" software

Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025

the machine has no intelligence, no opinion, no comprehension of anything. It obviously has no feelings, and most importantly, no memory. It won't have to deny being a fascist (like tories, starmerites, and other fascists usually do) because it genuinely doesn't remember. It doesn't exist

It's a bingo tumbler that feeds back into itself. It can never be held accountable, making it the perfect scapegoat when you need denial, and the perfect advocate when you need propaganda

Show threadSin VegaJun 12, 2025

"but sin it's morally neutral"
I don't care if you're lying or just naive, it's the same result at this point

"but what if we used it for our own purposes?"
it can't and won't serve our purpose because our purpose requires compassion and integrity. And competence. It's worthless to us

I'm sure some rebel kids will find some clever uses for it to sabotage and cause problems and embarassments. But that's essentially setting the fascism bus on fire: good and noble work, but the point is rejection

Show threadFix Your Heart or Die.Jun 12, 2025

@sinvega Is like trying to take on the social technology of bigotry to solve your racism problem. The medium is the message and the tech itself springs from people who hold fundamentally different ideas about what it is to serve and what goals need serving in the first place.

"Let's use the 'threaten you with a gun'-o-tron to reduce the amount of intimidation in society!"

Show threadVile LasagnaJun 12, 2025

@sinvega I was arguing something similar over lunch:

You can concoct a hypothetical about how these things COULD be used ethically and for good purposes and whatnot but, y'know... that's kinda pointless in face of the reality of the purpose they serve RIGHT NOW, which is to make everything worse on purpose and steal from people