“I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms.”
A post full of bangers.
Politics is more than partisanship, and what is meant by something being political isn’t necessarily that it aught to be affiliated to a political party’s position. It’s about making decisions in groups, status and power dynamics. It’s a very real problem among techs to cop out of the consequences of their actions upon society by stating being strictly apolitical, pointing to the narrow definition while occluding the most meaningful one.
Yet somehow it’s only bipartisanal places where “everything is political”.
Anything worth talking about is political. What the hell are you on about?
No True Scotsman much? The folding mechanism of my phone is not political.
Ah yeah the folding mechanism which just appeared one day out of nowhere, invented by nobody for no reason.
It was invented by fleshy humans to sell even bigger phones to people with the same hand size. It doesn’t make it biological because “fleshy”, at best it’s economical and anatomical.
Economics: the famously apolitical field that examines the distribution and creation of wealth, also a famously apolitical concept.
Ironically this whole exchange is an example of just how cooked American political discourse is. The culture war is so all-consuming that anything outside of that gets largely excised from political action entirely. Then when someone from outside the US tries to point out that basically unrestricted corporate looting and blatant violations of various human rights could be regulated or otherwise countered by political processes, people act like they’re speaking Martian.