From Wind Turbines to Energy Islands: Wind as Model Power in Denmark | Published in Media+Environment

By May Ee Wong. This article explains how fluctuating wind is shaped into stable “energy” as a media environment, just as wind as medium and milieu shapes infrastructural forms of wind power.

troubling AI: a call for screenshots 📸

The elite contradictions of generative AI

LSE’s Asher Kessler and Professor Nick Couldry reflect here on a recent essay by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, in which he offers a vision of the future and of AI’s role in it. Amodei…

AI, slavery, surveillance, and capitalism

(or AI for The Labor Question & What is Silicon Valley?)

Always Jamesonize! - Notes - e-flux

Frank Ruda on three operators of totalization in Fredric Jameson: rationalism, dialectics, and orientation.

Waiting for Robots

An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers’ hidden labor.   Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.   In this bracing and powerful book, Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.  Waiting for Robots urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.

Jameson at 90: A Verso Blog Series

Fredric Jameson turns 90 years old this month. To celebrate this milestone, we're publishing a series of short essays focused on the major books in Jameson's oeuvre.   *** Unintimidated languages – Daniel Hartley On prophetic form and the whole tangled, dripping mass of the dialectic – Christopher Breu Intense Curiosit