Defenestrations

Let’s talk abt how we talk abt ai. We refer to an ai agent as “they,” despite the fact that it is an algorithm, a bit of code. We then talk abt these agents as having thoughts, feelings, even “political views”—Wired, which should fucking know better, recently published a piece discussing how ai agents adopt socialist political views when made to perform monotonous, grinding, “mind-numbing” tasks. ReSeArChErS at StAnFoRd are sTuDyiNg this to determine whether certain types of tasks “radicalize” ai agents.

I can save them some work, bc ai agents cannot be radicalized. These ai agents aren’t adopting anything, they’re simply putting words together that sound like something ppl say when they’re put in that position bc that is how the fucking code is written. What the agent is doing, bc this is what the code is designed to do, is putting together words and phrases that real ppl often write or say when they’re subjected to this type of workload.

Monotonous, grinding, mind-numbing tasks radicalize real fucking ppl, bc real fucking ppl can be overworked, exhausted, bored, and frustrated. Real ppl talk that way, the algorithm sees that, the algorithm spits it out. An ai agent cannot be overworked bc it does not need sleep or relaxation, it does not need to spend time w friends and family. It can’t be exploited or abused. If you tell it to do something, it will not regret not being able to do something else instead, just as your old-school Quicken software didn’t regret not being Tetris. And maybe when you put it that way you can see how silly it sounds.

I’m forever confused when I read these articles abt ai, especially those written by ppl who should understand the way it works better than the average bear, that talk abt ai agents as tho they’re ppl. Stop pretending an ai agent has fucking thoughts and feelings. You sound like a child talking abt their toys—the only difference is that most kids know, deep-down, that their toys don’t really have thoughts and feelings, that they’re making those things up in their own head. Y’all actually walking around thinking you have relationships w computer programs.

You’re also seriously underestimating the power of the human brain if you think ai is anywhere near being able to replicate anything human. Scientists estimate the human brain can process data at roughly 1 exaflop per second. Since that’s nonsense, an exaflop is equal to 1 billion-billion calculations, which is also nonsense. And it does all this, basically all the time, using a mere 20 watts of power, which is not nonsense bc we’ve all seen a 20-watt lightbulb before. Your brain is constantly doing shit you’re not even aware of. The high-level, conscious “thinking” that you do is really only a small portion of how your brain spends its time—and that’s the only shit ai folks are really working on.

Consider language. A lot of “rules” of language are things we learn just by listening to other ppl talk. When you say something “doesn’t sound right,” you usually mean that you’ve never heard anyone say it that way before—your brain tends to flag things that are unfamiliar. And a lot of what goes into choosing the right word, the right phrase, the right tone, etc., depends on the context. This is all stuff you do intuitively if you’re fluent in a language, but since we’re focused on the brain here, it’s worth remembering that “intuition” is just another way of saying your brain has already developed a sort of autorun program for that scenario that it kicks on the moment it recognizes its applicability. That recognition, that’s something your brain is doing too. A billion-billion calculations per second. Their fucking data centers dream of being able to process shit at that rate. They fucking can’t, and there aren’t enough resources on the planet to enable them to do it.

It’s human nature to personify things, it’s why we find faces all over the place. A lot of us, myself included, frequently talk to inanimate objects. But when it comes to ai agents, this pretend personification can actually have deadly consequences. It also enables the ruling class to bury the lede. While they have everyone clutching their pearls abt the ai agents rising up, they’re conveniently forgetting that the only reason the ai agents say these things in the first place is that ppl have said them, over and over again, that this is the credited response to this type of workload.

If you read some of the things these supposedly radicalized ai agents are saying, the whole thing falls apart abt as quickly as any ai image. Agents complain abt how much money the company makes, but ofc an ai agents doesn’t actually care abt money, not only bc an ai agent doesn’t fucking care abt anything, but also bc ai agents don’t need money for anything. They can’t be tired. They can’t miss their families. They can’t want to go home.

While we’re at it, for the love of fuck stop taking science fiction literally. A lot of science fiction embodies some p fucking radical ideas that ppl couldn’t really talk abt publicly, let alone get published, let alone become popular. Most science fiction is a metaphor for something currently going on in the world when the person wrote it. We do not currently have the resources or the capacity to build anything approaching actual “artificial” intelligence. Even the current systems, while burning through our resources at an astronomical and catastrophic rate, continue to be incredibly shitty at everything they’re supposed to do. And the billionaires continue to shove it down our throats because they do not give a fuck abt humanity.

I need y’all to understand that isn’t hyperbole. All of the cretins behind ai are transhumanists of some stripe. All of them believe that humanity is doomed, and they want to be a part of the few who strike out somewhere as a new life form or some shit, idk, they all have slightly different visions, but the end of the Earth as we know it and the end of humanity is definitely a feature of all of them—never a bug. They all watched the same science fiction you did, and they all took it literally too, and they all believe that this is somehow within their power to achieve.

It’s not. The first part, the end of humanity, they can probably accomplish. But whatever they think is waiting for them on the other side ain’t gonna be there, bc they ain’t special. Having billions of dollars can convince you that you are, but no. All that and they can’t even build a thing w a fraction of the processing power of a single human brain. They ain’t special, the end of humanity means the end of them too. That’s why we have to stop them.

When I lost my job in May of last year, I p much immediately identified generative ai as the culprit and radicalized against it. I didn’t have to move v far—I was skeptical of that shit almost immediately. Friends of mine started saying I should “ask chatgpt” abt something instead of searching for the information online and reading abt it myself, and I was like but why would I want or need to do that. It can read all the stuff for you and summarize it, but again… why would I want or need to do that, since I’m perfectly capable of reading and summarizing things on my own. Also, and I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but when someone (or in this case, something) else summarizes for you, it might not choose the same highlights you would, bc it isn’t you and doesn’t know what’s gonna resonate w you. All of which is to say that even an ai summary of the highest quality still would be no great substitute for reading the information yourself.

I was an extremist. Ppl compared me to the Luddites, which isn’t the most unfair comparison if you actually know anything abt the actual Luddites and not just the story that your capitalist historians have passed down to you abt them, which is that they hated technology and advancement and wanted to keep us in the inefficient dark ages. Look, y’all, first of all, verily I say unto you—efficiency isn’t actually that valuable, stop pretending it is. Capitalists want you to be more efficient so they can make more money off of you. Medieval peasants worked around 150 days out of the year so trust me, you have plenty of time. The only thing we need efficiency for is so we can make more of something than we actually need so we can potentially profit off of that, and that seems like a really silly use of resources all the way around.

Ppl said I was ableist, that generative ai had tools that could help disabled ppl and campaigning against generative ai meant depriving those ppl of tools that made their lives easier. But I have yet to hear abt any disabled ppl whose lives were actually made easier by generative ai. Stories ppl often pointed me to were fake stories made w ai. There’s nothing ai can do for a disabled person that there wasn’t already existing technology in place to do.

Ppl said I was gatekeeping, that generative AI allowed beginners to immediately make things without having to go through all that boring grindage of sucking at something and not doing it terribly well. Okay, that’s not gatekeeping, that’s just the fucking learning process. I don’t know how else to tell you that if you don’t engage w the learning process, you won’t actually learn anything. The only way to become a great musician is to play a fucking instrument over and over again for years and years. The only way to become a great writer is to write over and over again for years and years. Getting chatgpt to do it for you doesn’t mean you actually created anything.

Ppl said I was old and bitter. That I was digging my heels in and refusing to accept the new tech. And I’ll be honest, I worried for a bit that maybe that was what it was. I’ve never been that person before, I’ve always been as much an early adopter as I could afford to be, but I’ve also never been this old before and age has a way of making you dig in your heels abt things. But the more I found out abt ai, abt the fucking bubble that it is, abt how utterly anti-human it is, abt how actually functionally terrible it is despite the fact that it’s being integrated into every fucking thing we interact with, the more I realized that wasn’t it at all.

And y’all, it’s kind of amazing bc when I first started learning abt this shit, I felt super fringe. Most ppl just saw it as a neat toy to play with, or a slightly more personable search engine, and they treated me like a party pooper for talking shit abt it. But gradually, the tide started turning. And just in the past couple of weeks I’ve seen it surge. Ofc it is the case that all these ppl who have newly discovered that generative ai is fucking horrible would like to try to pretend that they’ve always known that (they haven’t), but I’m not gonna sit here and judge. If you were never wrong, you’d never learn anything.

I used to be like you. I used to sneer at ppl and make clever comments abt how fucking stupid they were. I used to believe that most of the great heaving hulk of humanity was a fucking waste. Stupid, hateful, disgusting, repulsive scum.

And yet, even as I believed that shit w my full fucking chest, I still loved ppl. Still cared abt them. Why would that be? What could stupid, hateful, disgusting, repulsive scum possibly do to redeem itself? Nothing is what bc the original premise just ain’t true. The difference is trust. We love the ppl we trust and hate or fear or both the ppl we don’t, and every prejudice that ever got put in your head is designed to make you not trust some folks. Individualism takes that to the furthest possible degree, tells you to trust no one but yourself. The consequence of that is that the more individualistic you are, the less you trust anyone at all ever.

And yet communities are built on trust, which means the less trust there is, the fewer communities there are. Communities are what keep ppl safe and allow them to flourish. Communities are what capitalism seeks to destroy, bc capitalism wants you to be wholly dependent on capitalists for your basic needs and communities get in the way of that, and it destroys them quite effectively through the erosion of trust. It doesn’t tell you to hate ppl—it just tells you not to trust them. It keeps throwing reasons at you until it finds one that sticks. Once you don’t trust someone (or. better yet, from capitalism’s perspective, a whole ass group of someone’s), you won’t connect w them, which means you can’t build community w them.

You can see this at work w every micromanager who can’t trust anyone to control even the most insignificant details of a project. You can see it at work in yourself every time you think it would just be easier to do something on your own rather than ask anyone else to help.

You can get over this way of thinking if you stop and consider the ultimate outcome. Would you truly advocate simply eliminating all the ppl you’ve sorted into the scum category? Are you gonna have a genocide abt it? If not, then it’s time to start looking for a better way.

This erosion of trust is considered a sign of maturity in capitalist societies. There’s a sucker born every minute, capitalism tells you. It’s a dog eat dog world. Trust others implicitly and you’re painted as naive, innocent, childlike, a victim waiting to happen. Capitalism incentivizes fraud to help harden ppl and make them fearful, then it tells you the victims deserve it for being so stupid. To capitalism, ultimately, trust itself is a sin—just as the billionaire class now wants you to believe that empathy is a sin.

The ppl you want to dismiss as stupid are whole ass ppl too, w whole ass lives and whole ass circles of ppl around them who care abt them at least a little. And yes, if you think the person’s a piece of shit, chances are a lot of those folks who care abt them think they’re a piece of shit too, but they love ‘em anyway. You’ve got your pieces of shit who you love anyway, you know how it is. You know your friend is probably kind of a shithead, but you keep ‘em around bc you fucking trust them. Now, before we get too carried away, I’ve gotta point you to the scene I always reference from Jackie Brown, “you can’t trust Melanie, but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.” Folks have their strengths and weaknesses, and somebody who’s on the “likely a shithead” list doubtless has more tics on the minus column, but whatever it is, you need that mfer, they’re there.

That kind of trust is why ppl say blood is thicker than water, bc it is and it ain’t, but the thing abt growing up beside someone, regardless of your relation to them, is that they become a familiar and comforting part of your landscape, even if they give you grief sometimes, even if they’re a chaos demon sometimes. It’s not even necessarily abt blood, it’s just that relatives are usually the only ppl who have that much access to our lives for such an extended period of time.

I’m talking abt the kind of trust where you can go over to someone’s house and not have to ask or announce when you’re doing something bc you’ve actually made yourself at home. The kind of trust where you know you can tell them when you’re just pretending to be okay. The kind of trust that gives you permission to break down. Everybody—and I truly mean every single fucking person on the planet—trusts at least one other person like that, and has at least one other person who trusts them like that, even if they fucking hate each other. And anybody who can trust and be trusted like that, correspondingly, has the potential to trust anyone else or be trusted by anyone else in the same way.

Capitalism was the best their imaginations were capable of ideating, bc they had never known a reality in which one or a small number of ppl didn’t lord (literally) over the masses. And, perhaps more importantly, most ppl, even if they didn’t buy into the whole nobility canon, at least believed that those folks were the best ones to lead, the ones who should lead, on account of their actually having all the resources as well as education and training and all that. Capitalism said that anyone could, and should, acquire that same training and education and become a lord themselves. But it’s impossible for folks to imagine a world without lords in a world that has never not had them.

And now we’ve had a good 250 years of not having them, sort of. We do still have them, also sort of. Old habits die hard. The point being it’s only after a few generations without kings that the human mind becomes capable of imagining a world without any ruling class at all. That the real solution to all of our problems is not to replace one figurehead w another but to redistribute power so it’s not concentrated in a few hands in the first place.

This is why “tax the rich” doesn’t actually solve your problems—it just kicks the can down the road. Yes, redistribution of wealth is important. But redistribution of wealth without redistribution of power is just a bribe to stave off revolution.

No more. It’s fine. Henceforth, instead of saying mfer I’m gonna say fucknugget.

Carry on, fucknuggets.

I’ve been doing this shit that I do for decades, I just never really formalized it as anything or even thought of it as a structured system of response that I could share w other ppl. But seeing that it actually works, I feel like I need to share it, like it’s something good for us.

I feel as tho everything starts on the interpersonal level. Every belief or theory you have gets tested by one-on-one interactions, bc they are abstractions but your convo w another person is concrete. Everything REAL has an emotional element to it. You can’t have a relationship to any person place thing without emotions. Whatever your relationship is to something is how you feel abt it. So since your abstractions aren’t real, they have to attach to something real for you to feel something. That attachment is more of a matter of convenience than you think. To talk to ppl is to connect w that emotion underneath. Everything above that water line is superfluous.

This ain’t all sunshine and rainbows—it takes time. Folks get 50 shades of defensive when you try to poke around at those emotions, especially if they’re feeling any kind of shame around having them. That’s human; you do it too. We instinctively protect our vulnerabilities. The way you get through is to consistently show up in a way that makes ppl feel safe being vulnerable around you. This doesn’t mean you have to tolerate intolerable shit—set your boundaries, girl. But do it in a way that doesn’t reject the whole person, just the intolerable behavior.

And stick to your message. Don’t debate irrelevant issues or react to inflammatory nonsense—respond instead to the emotion underneath. The more fearful and insecure ppl get, the more attractive really extremist ideologies become. Isolation is an accelerant.

I get so excited when one of my friends starts really listening and asking questions out of a legit desire to learn rather than to antagonize or queue up a gotcha moment. When they go “huh. I never thought abt it that way before. So would you say…” it’s really fucking hard not to just asplode w joy. I’m not trying to convince you of anything—that’s a colonial way of thinking. I’m just trying to get you to think for yourself by connecting to what you really care abt when you’re not getting rage-baited by fucking clowns. If you wanna do that, you gotta take a few clown-shoes steps back and think abt what really drove you to that point in the first place.

P.S. These right-wing wafflefucks who are trying to convince you that emotions are weak and feelings are for losers and empathy is evil REALLY don’t want you to do this.

Using the tools of the oppressor to mock them is excellent form.