There is always change, as a neo-environmentalist would happily tell you; but there are different qualities of change. There is human-scale change, and there is industrial-scale change; there is change led by the needs of complex systems, and change led by the needs of individual humans. There is a manageable rate of evolution, and there is a chaotic, excitable rush toward shiny things perched on the edge of a great ravine, flashing and scrolling like sirens in the gathering dusk.

A scythe, too, is a progress trap. But it is limited enough in its speed and application to allow that control to be exercised in a way that is understandable by, and accountable to, individual human beings.

If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time.

What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around us.

“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

To ask that question in those terms is to misunderstand what is going on. Brushcutters are not used instead of scythes because they are better; they are used because their use is conditioned by our attitudes toward technology. Performance is not really the point, and neither is efficiency. Religion is the point: the religion of complexity. The myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up.

Collectieve digitale ruime

Wat is collectief als alles digitaal is? Is er wel een behoefte aan iets collectiefs als iedereen een eigen telefoon, insta, e-mailadres en 5G abonnement heeft?

Zoals Google die niet alleen meer ads in de zijbalk van je gmail zet, maar hier en daar als email vermomd tussen de rest van je email door.

Bij de voorvechters van autonome ruimte is er geen discussie over de waarde van een eigen plek.

De mooie plannen van Verhoeven en Eunen, de poging de oude wereld af te schudden door Barlow. Het zijn revoluties die de status quo steviger in het zadel hebben geholpen dan ooit te voren.

John Perry Barlow

Zoetermeer werd gebouwd met een rotsvast vertrouwen in de mensheid en de toekomst.

Ook een digitale collectieve ruimte moet worden opgeruimd.

Zodoende wil de systerserver ook niet groter worden. Het groeien, het uitbreiden, het overnemen; dat zijn termen uit een door dominantie gedreven patriarchale samenleving. Als er iets is dat moet groeïen, dan is het politiek bewustzijn, dat ook in bits en bytes onderdrukking en opstand plaatsvind, en dat het goed is om te kiezen aan welke kant je wilt bijdragen; aan de onderdrukkende kant, of aan de opstandige kant.

Als individu rest weinig meer dan deze vorm van power-grab te negeren en iedereen die er in mee gaat tot het oneindige belachelijk te maken. Als collectief moet je de zelfzuchtige pandjespikkers het leven zo zuur mogelijk maken met allerlei regelgeving.

ooit zeiden we dat als je niet betaald voor een dienst, je geen klant bent, maar het product. Maar je bent zelfs dat niet meer, je bent het leeggezogen karkas.

Met GPT-3 vielen opeens de schellen van velen ogen. Hier werden we geconfronteerd met een machine die teksten en beelden kon genereren die de stoutste verwachtingen te boven gingen. In een tijdloos moment van verstomde verbazing keken we naar een computer die opeens precies dat kon, wat wij als exclusief menselijk beschouwde: nieuwe creatieve uitingen creëren! Nieuw tekst, nieuw beeld, op basis van een paar woorden invoer. En niet langer beperkt door slaap, honger of andere behoeften: oneindig veel, meer, sneller, alles! Met open mond keken we in de afgrond die we zelf leken te zijn. En zelf bleken te zijn. Want al snel herkende de een haar eigen stijl, en de ander zijn eigen tekst en ontrafelde de betovering zich voor onze ogen. GPT-3 is een gigantische stochastische papegaai: het echoot de ideeën van duizenden mensen terug naar ons en lijkt zo intelligentie te bevatten, maar is niets meer dan een papegaai die de meest waarschijnlijk antwoorden aan je teruggeeft. Het heeft geen idee en wat het weet. Wat het bevat hebben we er samen ingestopt. Uren, dagen, maanden en jaren van collectieve arbeid. Professor Emily Bender, hoogleraar aan de Universiteit van Washington, beschrijft AI-oplossingen zoals ChatGPT als een ‘stochastische papegaai’. Stochastisch betekent een mate van willekeurigheid, die gebaseerd is op aannemelijke kans. En de papegaai staat natuurlijk bekend om het simpelweg imiteren van geluid dat het elders gehoord heeft. Bender beschrijft AI daarom als een systeem voor het lukraak samenvoegen van woordreeksen die het heeft waargenomen in zijn omvangrijke trainingsdata, zonder enige mate van inhoudelijk betekenis. Een stochastische papegaai. Haar oproep geldt daarom: “Verwar woord niet met betekenis. Let op je goedgelovigheid!” source: [https://boomstrategie.nl/artikel/de-impact-van-ai-waarom-we-er-allemaal-meer-van-moet-weten]

we zijn onbetaalde arbeidskrachten in een economie die de hoogste beloning uitbetaald aan diegene die de meeste mensen aan het werk weet te zetten zonder enige vergoeding.

Stel je het internet voor als een stapel laagjes. Je houdt de bovenste laag vast. Het is je duim op het scherm van je telefoon. Op het scherm staat een app van een of ander bedrijf, dat is de volgende laag. Die app komt uit een App Store; ook een laag. Welke App Store? Dat hangt af van het besturingsysteem (weer een laag!). Dat je kleurtjes ziet op je scherm, en als op je vingers reageren komt door firmware en protocollen, afspraken, die tussen de apps en het besturingssysteem zijn gemaakt. Het zorgt dat je batterij niet te heet wordt, je smartphone trilt en hij opnieuw opstart als er iets fout gaat. Dat is ook een laag. En vanaf daar graven we diep door naar het laagje hardware. Daar vind je de chip, het vibratie-motortje, het geheugen de opslag en de antennes. De antennes dienen als schakel naar je wifi punt thuis, die weer vast zit aan een modem om het signaal door kabels verder te brengen via de kleine grijze kastjes in je straat en verderop tot aan een centrale server. Al die router, wifi-punten hebben eigen soft-, firm en hardware en protocollen. En bestaan dus allemaal uit heel veel laagjes.Maar laten we het simpel houden. De plek waar we aankwamen; de server, staat in een datacentrum gemaakt van beton, verbonden met kabels van metaal en glas. En net als jouw computer of smartphone is de server in elkaar gezet in China in fabrieken met miljoenen arbeiders. Deze bedrijven kopen de duizenden verschillende componenten vanuit de hele wereld en maken er een machine van met werkende software. Maar waar je eigen computer een liefdevol verzorgt kleinnood is dat alle aandacht krijgt, staan de servers als kist-kalveren met duizenden opgepropt in grote hallen vol lawaai van koelsystemen. De datacenters zijn molochs van gewapend beton, omgeven door hekken met camera’s. Vierkante reuzen in het landschap met een voortdurend behoefte aan energie en dorst naar koelwater. En al die materialen, het plastic, de bijzonder metalen, het zand en het water komen ergens uit de aarde. Zoals kobalt, een metaal waar we niet zonder kunnen als we batterijen willen. Schoongemaakt door vrouwen in de Democratische Republiek van Congo terwijl ze tot over hun knieën in het vervuilde water staan dat hun benen aantast.Met andere woorden, je tiktok-verslaving zit via je duim vast aan deze ketting van laagjes aan een wereld van milieuschade en uitbuiting. Daarvoor helpt het niet om één laagje aan te passen (al is het wel een goed begin), maar moeten we nadenken over alle lagen. En we moeten nadenken over op welke plek we een collectief beginnen. Het makkelijkste is dicht bij jezelf te beginnen en op het niveau van apps, maar er is geen reden waarom we niet laag, na laag, na laag dieper zouden afdalen.

4 parameters

A lot of AI researchers and pundits imagine that the world is already digital, and that simply introducing new AI systems will immediately trickle down to operational changes in the field, in the supply chain, on the factory floor, in the design of products. Nothing could be further from the truth. The impedance to reconfiguration in automation is shockingly mind-blowingly impervious to flexibility. You can not give away a good idea in this field. It is really slow to change. The example of the AI system making paper clips deciding to co-opt all sorts of resources to manufacture more and more paper clips at the cost of other human needs is indeed a nutty fantasy. There will be people in the loop worrying about physical wiring for decades to come.

It is well understood that many cases of exponential processes are really part of an “S-curve”, where at some point the hyper growth flattens out. Exponential growth of the number of users of a social platform such as Facebook or Twitter must turn into an S-curve eventually as there are only a finite number of humans alive to be new users, and so exponential growth can not continue forever. This is an example of case (b) above.

Here is what goes wrong. People hear that some robot or some AI system has performed some task. They then take the generalization from that performance to a general competence that a person performing that same task could be expected to have. And they apply that generalization to the robot or AI system. Today’s robots and AI systems are incredibly narrow in what they can do. Human style generalizations just do not apply. People who do make these generalizations get things very, very wrong.

As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is exactly the wrong model.

They pulled it off by hiding a fast typist (with a keyboard) in another room. The microphone output was fed to a speaker, and the hidden typist translated the speech into keystrokes which appeared as text on the monitor with amazing speed and accuracy.

He carried the block of wood with him for a few weeks and pretended that it was a functional device in order to get insights into how he would use it. If someone asked for a meeting, for example, he’d pull out the block and tap on it to simulate checking his calendar and to schedule a meeting reminder.

“the poor [are] doomed to the Internet, a wonderful resource for watching shitty television, experiencing angst about other people’s salaries.”9 Built by “pointless men,” the net invokes nothing but trash and hate, leaving the poor empty-handed, with nothing to sell.10 The poor make money for Facebook. It will never be the other way round.

The main thing I want to say is that the problem with the left is that it’s obsessed with the problems of the individual. What they have neglected is power. It’s so important in our time, and in the discourse of right-thinking liberals, and right-thinking radical artists, the word power is practically never mentioned—it’s as if it doesn’t exist. But, actually, power shapes your world so much. That’s what I was trying to show in the film, that even on the echo chamber you occupy on Facebook, there are bits of code written that are shaping what you’re given. That’s power. There are computers shifting money around. That’s power. We’ve just got to try and bring it in focus. But because we’re so locked off to questions of the individual, we’ve lost sight of the questions of the collective, and that involves power.

What is the practical effect of this new truth on everyday life? Well, consider one example. In Turkey today, we are obliged to indulge a debate about whether minors should be married to their rapists. It is predicated on the “real people’s” truth that in rural areas girls get married even when they are just 13, and thus have sexual maturity. It is, we are told, a thoroughly elitist argument to insist that a minor cannot give consent.

this mobilised and organised ignorance has no time for any kind of intellect, even that which helped it capture the political stage in the first place.

We found, as you are now finding, that the new truth-building process does not require facts or the underpinning of agreed values. We were confronted – as you are being confronted – by a toxic vocabulary: “elite”, “experts”, “real people” and “alienated intellectuals”. The elite, with experts as mouthpieces of that oppressive elite, were portrayed as people detached from society, willing to suppress the needs, choices and beliefs of “real people”.

Le Guin isn't a hard science fiction writer, "technology is carefully avoided." I stuck a footnote onto this in my translation of the article, and here is the footnote expanded — because this business is really getting my goat. 'Hard' sf is all about technology, and 'soft' sf doesn't have any technology, right? And my books don't have technology in them, because I am only interested in psychology and emotions and squashy stuff like that, right? Not right. How can genuine science fiction of any kind lack technological content? Even if its principal interest isn't in engineering or how machines work — if like most of mine, it's more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work — still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology? Nobody can. I can't imagine why they'd want to. Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine - and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren't interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I'm fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too. Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word. "Technology" and "hi tech" are not synonymous, and a technology that isn't "hi," isn't necessarily "low" in any meaningful sense. We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "technology " at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers -- as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe... One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one? Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for "low" or "primitive" or "simple" technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention. I don't know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don't know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That's the neat thing about technologies. They're what we can learn to do. And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it's written by people who don't know what the word means. All the same, I agree with my reviewer that I don't write hard science fiction. Maybe I write easy science fiction. Or maybe the hard stuff's inside, hidden — like bones, as opposed to an exoskeleton....

In the earliest "information wants to be free" days of the internet, objectives were lofty. Online access was supposed to unleash positive and creative human potential, not provide a venue for sadists, child molesters, rapists, or racial supremacists. Yet this radically free internet quickly became a terrifying home to heinous content and the users who posted and consumed it.

“Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations – they want to live more ethically – and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism. Give me hypocrisy any day.”

Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.

The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained.

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

On an island in the North Atlantic, leagues below the surface, subterranean veins of liquid rock well upward through primordial vents, whereupon they make contact with equally ancient aquifers, producing steam that is artfully siphoned off and passed through turbines, which, when spun up, produce bountiful, carbon-free electricity. This great stream of benign electrons – a true social good if ever there was one – is then passed onward, by means of cables, to some of the most esoteric, purpose-built computers ever assembled. These machines patiently wade through a truly psyche-shattering number of useless calculations, each one a discarded digital lottery ticket. Ever-more rarely, one of them strikes algorithmic gold. In an instant, the winning computation is transmuted into units of cryptocurrency, and on the other side of the planet, a Chinese hedge fund collects a small reward. This is how the world works now: the geophysical system connects to the computational system, which links to the financial system, which shapes the geopolitical system, and round and round we go.

In his infamous 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing introduced the notion that a computer is nothing more than a machine that functions by pretending to be other machines.

Whether this notion was brilliant or naive, I couldn’t decide, but it felt revelatory. There in the pool, immersed in clouds of steam that fostered a sense of mystic intimacy, I wondered whether a generation that found the concept of privacy archaic might be undergoing a great mutation, surrendering the interior psychic realms whose sanctity can no longer be assured. Masking one’s insides behind one’s outsides—once the essential task of human social life—was becoming a strenuous, suspect undertaking; why not, like my teenage acquaintance, just quit the fight? Surveillance and data mining presuppose that there exists in us a hidden self that can be reached through probing and analyses that are best practiced on the unaware, but what if we wore our whole beings on our sleeves? Perhaps the rush toward self-disclosure precipitated by social media was a preemptive defense against intruders: What’s freely given can’t be stolen. Interiority on Planet X‑Ray is a burden that’s best shrugged off, not borne. My teenage friend was onto something. Become a bright, flat surface. Cast no shadow.

When I told him about my NSA excursion, he sighed and shook his head. Surveillance, he said, was pointless, a total waste. The powers that be should instead invite people to confess their secrets willingly. He envisioned vast centers equipped with mics and headphones where people could speak in detail and at length about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, delivering in the form of monologues what the eavesdroppers could gather only piecemeal.

Every measured physical quantity is defined by its numerical value and its dimensions. We don’t quote c simply as 300,000, but as 300,000 kilometres per second, or 186,000 miles per second, or 0.984 feet per nanosecond.

Each collision increases the amount of debris, which in turn increases the likelihood of more collisions, and there’s danger of a domino effect situation, which scientists call the Kessler Syndrome.