| > “AI” is a political project – I have also sometimes called it a narrative – whose purpose is the shifting of power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures. Why is this necessarily a bad thing from the author's POV? I'm going to argue from the author's frame, as a self-described communist [1] and believer in Stafford Beer's views on purpose of systems. Take Project Cybersyn [2], Stafford Beer's cybernetics engine for orchestrating socialist Chile's entire economy. An example of an equally a "political project" that did "shift power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures". The same system that was used to organise Chilean economy could've been easily repurposed to strip labour rights, quash strikes before they even happen or "squeeze the working class". This is at odds with the author's thesis that technological artifacts are inherently political, not that politics is applied to technological artifacts. A simpler argument can be made for cars and urban planning before and after the introduction of jaywalking laws. > Democracy is not just about voting but about ensuring that all power – especially by the state – is used in accordance with the law and in a fair way. Stochastic “AI” systems break that promise. The “AI” just says that you do not get the support you need. No idea why, might be a bug or a deeply racist training data set or something else. Nobody knows. Looking back at Project Cybersyn, which I assume the author, a self described communist, considers a system that would improve democratic participation in society, the central modelling function that Cybersyn used was based on Bayesian filtering, another stochastic method in the Generative model family. In believe the author isn't actually at odds with LLMs or AI, but with who controls the technology, since he seems to appreciate stochastic centrally planned socialist systems created by the people he admires. This makes me think that the article is written from a visceral response to deployment of AI, and a rationalisation of that visceral reaction, rather than from the author's principled views, again, as a self-declared communist and appreciator of Stafford Beer. [1] https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn |