just me rambling about our tech overlords again, feel free to ignore
it's just wild to me that there used to be this baseline understanding that computers and their programs should exist to do quantitative things things that humans CAN do but that computers can do faster. compiling and comparing data. calculation and dealing with huge numbers. speeding up lengthy processes. understanding things that are on a scale that is challenging for the human mind to study. making communication possible over great distance. etc.
these are such useful things! i am so glad computers can do them now! but as spock and kirk both remind us at various times, we should not entrust computers with judgement calls. they're not there for qualitative judgements. in fact, letting a computer make consequential decisions about things that require wisdom, compassion, and an understanding of context is EVIL.
but this principle has been totally jettisoned. it's like it never even existed.
now we have computers deciding who to release on bail or who is most likely to commit future crimes, who should be interviewed for jobs, who should be policed and how, who is trustworthy or of value, etc. all these things that humans should never, ever, ever have entrusted computers to do. and it is so appalling to me.
these computer programs can create nothing new. by compiling and synthesizing what humans have already created, they're just spitting out what we put in. they aren't pushing us towards somewhere we haven't been, they're just further entrenching systems that already exist. racism, misogyny, imperialism, capitalism, greed, and other ugly things are being codified into the technologies that determine both how we live now and how we will live in the future.
there are thousands and thousands of traumatized and underpaid workers in the global south who are "training" this data, but the standards they are forced to use were created by the tech overlords, who are almost uniformly white, rich men from the global north. none of the wisdom and insight of women, the poor, indigenous people, truly queer people (some of the tech overlords are gay, but they aren't queer in the sense of pushing back against the mainstream), our elders, people from oral cultures, people who speak minority languages, or anyone who isn't a specific kind of (mostly) white cis dude is being integrated into the design of these products. the inputs are almost uniformly texts that were written by the rich, those who speak english, white people, cis men, etc. many of these texts, from public domain classics to reddit conversations, can be useful tools, but let's not pretend the input reflects a cross-section of the human experience. the hard-won wisdom of our grandmothers is absolutely not informing the development of these products.
i reject the idea that technology is neutral in and of itself and its morality depends only on how it is used. maybe that was true in the early days of pulleys and levers and wheels, but it is not longer true. these days, technology is not neutral. technology is DESIGNED and as such it has presupposition, principles, priorities molding it. some of those are very intentionally chosen by (again) our tech overlords whose worldview i find abhorrent. some of those are completely opaque to everyone--we simply don't know how the algorithms work, so we don't know what they're prioritizing. that is TERRIFYING.
i hate this. i hate it so much. and i am lacking in the vocabulary to describe the zeitgeist.
i mean, i can talk about hating silicon valley or "generative ai" or capitalism, and that's true. but what i'm talking about so much more expansive than that. it is a specific kind of worldview that values quantitation over qualitative approaches to life, efficiency over doing things humanely, markets over care. it wants to streamline all the friction out of human existence, even though that friction is what MAKES human existence. it wants to live forever but doesn't have anything to live for. it wants us to be consumers instead of flourishing human beings or collaborative creators. it doesn't care about community unless it can manipulate identities for its own ends. it cares about ends and never about means, but even the means it cares about are extremely narrow in scope. it hates nature and the physical world and wants to replace it with a digital universe. it thinks everything can and should be scaled. it is totalizing and ignores context, history, specificity. it views bodies as technology to be improved and perfected...when it doesn't want to escape the body altogether. i'd say it's cerebral and not embodied, except it's not cerebral either, what with these tech overlords talking about how introspection is BAD actually. so it rejects both our bodies and our minds, leaving...what? money? power? self-aggrandizement? i honestly don't even know what these people DO value or love. i don't even think they love or value themselves, not really. so what else is left?
it's a death cult that can't admit it's a death cult. why do we let these people decide the path that all of humanity will take????
