You don't hate LLMs. You hate computers.
I'm serious. I mean LLMs are annoying in their own way, but all computers and computer like things are there to make work more efficient. That is to say, less total people, doing less overall work but each individual having to do more. Computers are just the production line in a factory with better PR. Charlie Chaplin was right.
@individeweal the right response, because I am being a bit silly. The real claim is not that you hate computers, not LLMs. It is that there is no consistent position in which you rail against LLMs but not the IT world more generally. Even this is strictly false, as we shall see. It is very influenced by this article:
https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/
It is maybe better to start at the other end though. First the counterexample. You once pointed out to me that LLMs are bad in a very specific way. They poison the web, by scraping sites, putting huge loads on servers and making it too expensive for the little guy to run their own site. That is a reason to hate LLMs that is unique to them, I think. It is also not a very deep objection to them and not what motivates much of the hatred.
People also like to claim that they hate the tech because it is useless, but that is bullshit. They don't do all they are cracked up to do, sure, but they do solve some problems. To use your example of tech allowing communication, they are good editors and translators. I use Deepl every day to write better French or to understand texts in languages I don't speak. I use speech-to-text software to write most of my stuff. This is improved dramatically by LLMs. They are good at summarising text, enough to allow for interactive natural language searches.
All of this feeds into what really upsets people about the tech. It is making jobs obsolete. This is what computers have been doing for ages. You used to have an army of highly skilled archivists and clerks to organise data and to do the searches. Now you have massive databases you can query from anywhere. The fear of the LLM is that it will do away with the database.
But it is not the job loss that really upsets people though, at least if they are not hypocrites. Where after all are the typists, the runners, the compositors, the typesetters, the legions of people in the sorting office? Done away with by computers. Where even are the artisans, the taylors, the book binders, the weavers? Outsourced to sweatshops in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Here we get back to Whittaker's article. This whole global system of exploitation and environmental destruction is dependent on the vast data processing and storage power of computers. Palantir doesn't exist because Peter Thiel is the Antichrist. Peter Thiel exists because he is the embodiment of what computers were built to do. The reason there is a PC in on every desk and smart phone in every pocket is that IT takes the logic of the production line and expands it into every aspect of our lives. We are all Charlie Chaplin, turning our spanner to the rhythm of the machine.
Chaplin perhaps thought that the modern world was redeemable because we could film it. You might think that it is redeemable because we can talk to each other across continents. I do think that what the opporbium to LLMs reveals is a deep anxiety with the computerisation of our modes of production and of our lives.
@RobertoArchimboldi @individeweal
"All of this feeds into what really upsets people about the tech. It is making jobs obsolete."
i could make a similar claim to yours, here. no, people aren't upset that jobs are obsolete, or about automation, they are upset that unemployment is high and wages are low, that they are confined to wage slavery
automation under a liberatory system is not objectionable to many people. your arguments seem to be geared towards liberals more than radicals.
@johnbrowntypeface @individeweal I think that my target here is indeed the liberals. We definitely need to end wage slavery and the bureaucratic administrative state that underpins it.
I am suspicious of claims of automation within a liberatory system. It feels like automation requires central, top down control. Indeed I suspect that this is the lesson that we should learn from the Soviet Union. I'm not sure though. It could be a false dichotomy. It accepts the Benthamites claim that the traditional liberties of the 18th Century were incompatible with the 'benefits' of industrialisation and Victorian 'progress'. Maybe that is just pure propaganda and we can freely organise to have a high level of material luxury
That's a very narrow way to define "efficient". It ignores things like "energy consumption".
@RobertoArchimboldi
nah, I hate LLMs and i'm annoyed by and suspicious of the dominance of computers in social life & production
generative AI is digital colonialism. i'm not interested in any development of AI 'til/unless we're free enough that it could possibly be something other than a tool of extraction and destruction
@johnbrowntypeface I think that we agree in fact. What I was trying to express was that computers are digital colonialism. They were built to 'rationalise' production. That is what they do. It is the tool par excellence of Benthamite 'efficient' administration, read destruction of autonomy (collective control of our lives) in the name of top down imposition of 'the good' (the interests of the ruling class).
I think that generative AI by being novel brings out the logic that we have become accustomed to and so don't see. It becomes, rightly, a site of resistance. We need to remember that colonialism goes deeper. Just as the movement for the liberation of Palestine has to be part of a movement for the liberation of Europe and the US
i am sympathetic to computers as an extension of digital colonialism. but i feel though they exist in the same authoritarian setting, there is more room to use them in less extractive ways. that being said they've been created by and used in the same systems, so there is no way to separate them from it
i'm increasingly opposed to the cult of rationality/scientism. how many use stats to discuss behavior is very dehumanizing imo. absolutely ignores individual autonomy
@RobertoArchimboldi
today over eight billion people live on earth. the iterative industrial revolutions of the modern age are what made this growth in population possible, and a regression from those industrial technologies (particularly those used in agriculture, food preservation and refrigeration, medicine, etc.) would mean mass die-offs.
to be absolutely fair, even before llms became popular, our industrialized capitalist society was already creating the very conditions that are leading to billions of people and billions of other organisms dying off in a total climate collapse. so it obviously isnt all good stuff.
those two facts present us with a dilemma: how do we stop die-offs from happening either way?
i think we must improve on our current society by massively changing how we use industrial technology. this includes entirely ceasing the use of technologies which are detrimental to the flourishing of earthly life.
but if i understand your argument in this thread correctly, it is industry itself, and all its technologies, which must cease to exist. i completely disagree with that, although i think i may have done your argument a disservice and would like to address it at its strongest.
@redrozalia I'm going to have to give up for the day quite soon. I don't want to be Malthusian (racist) or Anarco-Primitivist (silly). I'm worried that you are showing me that I am both.
To come at this obliquely, I have been thinking about what decolonised medicine might be. This is through conversations with a Nigerian doctor friend. I'm going to use the MRI scanner as a symbol. There are, I think, three in all of Nigeria. You cannot treat hepatitis in Nigeria because you need to be able to monitor the liver with an MRI scanner. Even rich people can't have that. The former president, Buhari, was treated abroad because of the lack of facilities in the country.
Now you might think, well MRI's are expensive, but if we spent less money on F35s and taxed Elon Musk, we could have enough MRI's for everyone. It seems to me though that MRI's require more than the wires and magnets. They require a pharmaceutical industry, a massive university system for public research and that in turn requires a really well ordered, stable and materially rich society.
Here is where it gets handwavy. That localised stability requires enormous expenditures of energy. It is the inevitable fight against entropy. It requires massive degrees of social control and externalising the costs by extracting oil from the Niger Delta and coltan from Congo. That in turn requires dispossessing and dominating the people of the region. It may not need F35s and Musk, but it will always be the privilege of the few. You have to have a vast population of oppressed workers who are little more than slaves.
Beyond that it also requires massive levels of social control. Thinkers like Arendt and CLR James and artists like Bergman and Tove Jansson were acutely aware of the horrors of bureaucracy and the modern administrative state. Freedom, in the sense of control over the space of our lives, is sacrificed for the efficiency that allows the production of the MRI machine. Note that freedom and power are synonyms and understood not in the capitalist sense of getting what you want, but in the collectivist sense of being able to create, to do things. Because that requires others, no one will get what she wants other than the ability to direct her own life.
If we are to organise with our neighbours to control the space of our lives and to collectively decide on our own futures, there will be no MRI's. No one will agree to running a high speed train line through their community or giving up their home for a mine. We also won't be controllable. There is simply no way to run the kind of high tech, highly coordinated system that is required to make MRI scanners, without top down control.
I think that is OK. I will be dead. I broke my neck at 22. I was airlifted to a specialist trauma centre and put on a ventilator. I probably had an MRI scan, certainly a lot of CT scans. Skilled surgeons using mind blowing anaesthetics did their thing. I don't think that I can demand that you go down a mine in Congo or work in a sweatshop in Bangladesh so that I live. I also would rather, I think, have had a chance to be free, to share a world with you, than live, my admittedly very lovely life, in this one
@RobertoArchimboldi
it is all very well for you to come to terms with your inevitably shorter life in a world where modern industrial medical technology has been abandoned, but i dont think you can speak on anyones behalf to say, i think people ought to be free rather than to live.
i want to be free, too. i understand that under some conditions, it is righteous to say "liberty or death!" and die for your principles. but i would much rather have liberty and life than just throw my hands up in acceptance of my death or the deaths of maybe billions more (specifically: all the chronically ill and disabled people first, followed by an increasing proportion of mothers and infants dying in childbirth)
i think it is possible, with the abolition of capitalism and private property, with the rational and coordinated action of people around the world, that we can still extract resources and have industrial production, in good working conditions and no exploitation.
i dont really see why the existence of industrial production, mris, high-speed trains, universities, or the very possibility of a stable and prosperous society are inexorably linked to massive oppression and inequality. cant groups of people in a classless society figure out ways of making these things? what is it about these things that make them impossible, whereas of course in a classless society people can still hunt and fish and farm on a small scale because those things are pre-industrial?
@redrozalia I hope that you are right. You probably are. We should note though that outside of a very few places, the sort of medicine that keeps me alive does not exist at the moment. I have full respect for a politics that says that it should.
Humans are good at looking after each other. There are skeletons of people with congenital disabilities who lived to an old age from the stone age. In addition technology does not require industrialisation. We see amazing tech from every continent long before capitalism got its boots on.
I do think that capitalism is a prerequisite of the sort of high tech medicine that we are discussing. I also think that capitalism is unredeemable and inherently racist. Capitalism is the combination of two theories. Firstly that nothing has value, merely price. This is the transformation of things into capital. Anything and everything is a fungible input into production or output for consumption. I think that the insight of double entry accounting is that everything is both. The second thesis is that the world should be run by and for the owners of capital. That is, by those who control the means of production.
Things are not capital. 10 carrots are not equivalent to a cheap paperback, though they may cost the same. More importantly, your land is not equivalent to the value of the iron deposit underneath it. However, by insisting on viewing the world in those terms, capitalism does lay the conditions for the creation of material abundance. We are seeing the effects of over production.
Marx thought that the problem was the second thesis, not the first. Maybe you do too. Sometimes I think that Marx was right. He thought that if the working class controlled the means of production, if they owned it collectively, they could plan production properly so that we produced what we needed for a good life for ourselves.
The reason that I usually think that Marx was wrong is that things are not capital. They are things. Land especially is the space of our lives. It is not something that can be exchanged because it is more efficient to pull the iron out than to grow crops or sunbathe on it or have meetings and so on.
It is here that capitalism and colonialism come together. Capitalism requires turning the space of our lives and our capacities to work and to care into inputs into production. Before the British colonialised most of the world they kicked the poor off the land and enclosed the commons. British capital having run out of places to invest at home (read: dispossess) went abroad and repeated the process. At its heart capitalism is about bringing more and more people into the world markets, that is to say subjecting everything and everyone to logic. It will have to create a group who has not to produce for those who have.
The problem is that is the logic of turning everything into capital that allows for the extraordinary technological acheivements of industrial society. The Marxists found that having control of the means of production still required a massive dehumanising bureaucracy. I think that is because freedom requires seeing each other and our world as valuable and non-fungible. Once you do that, you cannot ask me to give up my home, my sunbathing spot, my time for your high speed train.
It is not primitivism. We know that pre-colonial, including European societies, were technologically, artistically, spiritually, politically, and philosophically rich. They were not utopias, but they show the extraordinary range of ways that we could organise our lives. They cared much more deeply for disabled people than we do, but there were many things that they could not do.
My hope is that we can find ways of doing things that are better. I think that being able to work with others to create and to do, ie to be free, is better than a world where a privileged few have access to MRIs.
@RobertoArchimboldi
if i understand correctly, your distinction between value and price corresponds to marxs distinction between use value and exchange value. while a things use value is just a consequence of it being used in some way, exchange value is a feature of something specific: not just any thing, but a commodity, and not in just any society, but in a particular form of society, capitalism.
marx did not assume that things simply have prices, as a natural thing inherent to them like their mass or their chemical composition. his project in "capital" was to describe how capital functions, and more importantly how it destroys its own basis for existence. he didnt just criticize capitalism for empowering a small class of owners, but for the very way that things become commodities and are used to make more commodities, made into capital.
marx conceived of communism as a society in which the "law of value" would be abolished, in which commodity production and the system of wage labor would be just as outdated as slavery and serfdom. in other words, all those things that are now commodities and capital would cease to have their price and return to being mere things.
without a state to beat them, a capitalist to starve them, or a landlord to rob them blind, every person is free to engage in labor to the best of their ability, and free to engage in rest to the extent of their need—and then some more, since the end of the profit motive would make a lot of labor completely pointless. one thing that would likely take up more time is collective decision-making.
if a bunch of people think that building a railroad would be a useful thing to do, theyre probably going to try to do it. if this comes into conflict with several sunny spot enjoyers who object to the plan as presented, thats a problem. in capitalism, this could be a legal battle between local private property interests and some corporation formed by the state to build a railroad. in communism, this is a deliberation between groups of people, not divided by lines of class or birth nor by offices of power, arguing with the aim of reaching consensus.
attendance at these deliberations would be voluntary, so there would absolutely be a bias in favor of people with more energy, patience, confidence, communication skill, and persuasiveness. this is hard to compensate for, but i think there should be an emphasis on accomodating for the needs of disabled people, children, and elderly people, to make their voices heard.
the kind of coordination and planning necessary to have an industrialized society is pretty huge. indeed, it didnt exist until capitalism did. that is why marx understood capitalism as a progressive step compared to feudalism, in that it set up the conditions that make communism possible. among these conditions are what he called the "socialization of labor".
whereas on a family farm or in domestic manufacturing, the peasants of old europe only ever worked in family-size groups more or less, capitalism brought with it mass manufacture, and then mass industry, and created structures through which decisions were being made collectively on the level of hundreds or even thousands of workers all at once. it isnt the capitalists who busy themselves with the nitty gritty of operating a business, they leave that to their managers, their foremen, and ultimately to the workers themselves.
marx reasoned that if thousands of workers could act together on the orders of bosses, they could organize and learn to act together of their own collective will. when capitalism created the modern working class, it created something that is capable of everything capitalism has done and better, and doesnt need capitalists to do anything. this is why marx thought that industrial production wasnt just compatible with communism, but that it made communism possible.
at this point we are no longer able to entirely prevent the collapse of the biosphere. we may be able to mitigate its effects and minimize the number of lives lost, and the biggest obstacle is getting rid of capitalism, the system that caused this mess. as i see it, there is no force on earth which is capable of accomplishing this except a self-organized mass of people that spans every continent. that kind of connection and coordination is a product of the capitalist world just as much as the crisis itself is, and will certainly require industrial technology.
@redrozalia this is brilliant and very helpful, as well as hopeful.
Quickly, you are of course right to point out that Marx does imagine price falling away and production according to need by free, voluntary association and that he thinks in terms of use-value. I had forgotten that bit, shameful.
I still think that Marx is a classical economist who differs from Smith by noticing that the interests of the workers are not the same as the interests of the owners, hence the class conflict. What he shares though is the idea that there a measurable interest. That is to say, that there is a knowable best arrangement. So even if you are thinking in terms of use, the land of your village may measurably be better used as a mine.
I think that the value of your village is not measurable. It is not commensurate with the value of a mine. It is the space of your life.
I think that Marx imagines free, liberated people collectively coming to the right answer about what to do about the village over an iron deposit because we will come to the measurable right answer. As you rightly point out, the workers already control production and do a damn good job. If we also got to control the goals, imagine what we could do.
What I think is that there is no measurable answer to the question: what should we do with the village. Its value is not its use. When we are free, we will work out what we want to do and how we want to do it and then we will change our minds.
But yes, we have a problem because, as you say, climate breakdown is starting. We require the technology and systems that caused the breakdown in the first down to prevent mass death, but we are going to have to transition to a non-extrativist economy if we are to be free
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