What I want to know is this: what force lies behind the screens and wires of the web in which we are now entangled like so many struggling flies, and how we can break free of it... In short: What is this thing? And how should it be faced?
I had read up until there, but stepped away to do something else. I was looking forward to coming back to something more ambitious beyond the recent spate of "AI" talk, like some kind of analysis within a larger context of the forces pushing us towards technological/economic determinism (slash digital authoritarianism) for the past few decades - the elephant in the room that all of these alarmist "OMGAI" articles conveniently leave out.
Instead, this article disappointingly nose dived into the superstitious/religious, with its characteristic lack of constructive ideas - essentially just lamenting that we're no longer in the past when things were oh-so-simple. Not that there isn't some fundamental wisdom in the religious tales and prognostications of old, but to take them literally as descriptive models that are directly applicable to novel phenomena is utterly vacuous.
This is starkly demonstrated in the second installment of the essay, where the author leans on "I won’t have a smartphone in the house" as if that is an example of ascetic restraint. Sorry, abstention is not principled engagement!
I've developed my own personal philosophy mostly revolving around libre software and personal computing autonomy, which I think has done a decent job of letting me dodge many attention-economy bullets. But it doesn't feel particularly apt for confronting what ML is poised to do. Which is why I was hoping for something a bit more general and constructive, but alas this isn't it.
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I had read up until there, but stepped away to do something else. I was looking forward to coming back to something more ambitious beyond the recent spate of "AI" talk, like some kind of analysis within a larger context of the forces pushing us towards technological/economic determinism (slash digital authoritarianism) for the past few decades - the elephant in the room that all of these alarmist "OMGAI" articles conveniently leave out.
Instead, this article disappointingly nose dived into the superstitious/religious, with its characteristic lack of constructive ideas - essentially just lamenting that we're no longer in the past when things were oh-so-simple. Not that there isn't some fundamental wisdom in the religious tales and prognostications of old, but to take them literally as descriptive models that are directly applicable to novel phenomena is utterly vacuous.
This is starkly demonstrated in the second installment of the essay, where the author leans on "I won’t have a smartphone in the house" as if that is an example of ascetic restraint. Sorry, abstention is not principled engagement!
I've developed my own personal philosophy mostly revolving around libre software and personal computing autonomy, which I think has done a decent job of letting me dodge many attention-economy bullets. But it doesn't feel particularly apt for confronting what ML is poised to do. Which is why I was hoping for something a bit more general and constructive, but alas this isn't it.