Today’s Imma-up-this comes from my friend and hero, Tomislav Medak, on the question of rejecting AI:, sparked by a convo about freedomlibertyandhiphop / frihedlighedoghiphop:
The problem is that the outright rejection leaves us short in collectivising its use against a couple of behemoths driving its development atm. The subscription model makes it an individualised consumer good — and the internet had just the opposite starting point — so that collectively making it work for progressive ends comes hard.
This. THIS. This is such a crucial point, and not just in regard to AI. We can hear echoes of it across the disciplines — for example, in debates about genetic engineering (say, gain-of-function or GMO research like so “golden rice”), about NIMBYism vs YIMBYism in environmental planning, about the appropriate uses of the explosions of data that technocultures generate, about the shifting logic and impacts of gender freedoms as people grow from children to elders, and most of all all about how we should address climate disruption. Everywhere you look where there’s an ethical debate, you’ll see a tug-of-war between a constellation of fundamental distinctions — individual vs collective, optimism vs pessimism, reward vs risk, profit vs loss.
The way we glue these questions together is the essence of political economy. The dominant model now, neoliberalism, relies on a narrow, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose illogic: individual / optimism / reward / profit versus collective / pessimism / risk / loss.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can also see the systemic challenge that “AI” poses — to naive ideas about individual achievement (which we know are problematic), about our relationship to the collective legacies of civilizations, about how we gain and apply our own and others’ knowledge and skills — as an opportunity for fundamental change. But only if we actively, deliberately, and critically engage with it on every level.
And, again, not just AI. This is everything.