#tescreal

The studios fought like hell for the right to fire their writers and replace them with chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that the chatbots could do the writers’ jobs.

Think of the bosses who fired their human switchboard operators and replaced them with automated systems that didn’t solve callers’ problems, but rather, merely satisficed them: rather than satisfying callers, they merely suffice.

Studio bosses didn’t think that AI scriptwriters would produce the next Citizen Kane. Instead, they were betting that once an AI could produce a screenplay that wasn’t completely unwatchable, the financial markets would put pressure on every studio to switch to a slurry of satisficing crap, and that we, the obedient “consumers,” would shrug and accept it.

Despite their mustache-twirling and patrician chiding, the real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders.

-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers

Aboslutely not a dogwhistle (?), I was being earnest and quite literal when I wrote that.

I can tell you what I am thinking of, building on some hasty tags I wrote on a previous reblog of this same post. I'm sorry if it's not very clear, I write in a Brazilian way:

The development of the ideology influencing the tech-economical elite of world's current hegemony, the USA, is spearheaded by people with a mentality that justifies present exploitation and ruin by saying such evils are necessary in order to safeguard the long-term future of mankind (like a bastardized form of accelerationism). I believe it is our moral duty to fight for the right to make an option that could, in the same terms, implicate the annihilation of such a future --- in favor of the cultivation of present human dignity.

(I specify "in the same terms" because I think those terms are, materially speaking, some bullshit.)

I don't think this is much different from the debate regarding abortion rights. One side understands it to be moral to sacrifice the dignity of one who is pregnant in favor of this virtual concept of that embryo as a future person. The other side thinks no promise or concept is worth the violation of that pregnant person who actually exists. Take this to an extreme, for the sake of an argument, and you have the type of ideological fight I'm talking about.

No idea of a future human or a future humanity is worth the violation of the human and the humanity that exists here and now. When I put it that way it seems obvious, but I think if one is engaging with these philosophical and/or ideological questions, one has to contemplate what taking this conviction to radical extremes looks like, since our enemies are doing the same with theirs.

not arriving at a solution that permanently writes off human presence beyond Earth or bodily autonomy beyond some specific, likely arbitrary threshold, or

arriving at such a solution while actually giving a good explanation of why even a better society under a better economic system can never be trusted to do anything along those lines, specifically responding to anti-capitalist proposals and visions on that front?

Technolibertarian bullshit will be one of the worst errors of ideology to befall the left this century and will be biting us in the ass for decades to come.

People in this neighborhood generally don't talk about the TESCREAL acronym thing. I suspect they don't consider Torres and Gebru to be serious academics and they're just hoping it will blow over.

Basically, what it boils down to is that Gebru's priority is encoding left-wing values into AI to advance the political influence of leftism, while every other ideology listed in the acronym, from Transhumanism to Effective Altruism, has some priority other than that.

I don't mean "the other priority is opposing leftism." Many transhumanists are left-leaning or liberal. But Gebru et al tend to be conflict theorists, and this gets in the way of having a leftism that's beneficial to human beings.

the big reason i have a hard time taking the "tescreal is a cult that's taking over silicon valley!!!" rhetoric seriously is that the set of ideologies tescreal points to haven't really had any... significant effect on the world. people meme about how "techbros" are terrified of roko's basilisk and paperclipping but if you look at what's actually happening you see that AI development is only accelerating. cryonics is still a joke niche field nobody takes seriously as far as i can tell. musk talks about going to mars but hasn't even gotten to the moon. everything that has happened is also completely compatible with and explained by the generic libertarian techno-optimism that's dominated the tech industry for the past 30 years or so.

i also find a lot of writing by e.g. Torres, who i think is one of the big anti-tescreal writers, suspect, as noted here.