Notices by felix stalder (festal@tldr.nettime.org)

@EubieDrew or boots only the first post in the thread and the rest can be easily accessed through the threading.

2/ One is digitization, where market forces created extreme concentrations of wealth and power while threatening everyone else with redundancy (most recently even artists, long presented as neoliberal role models). It destroyed the public sphere (a problematic construct to begin with), replacing it with a system of chaotic volatility.

The other is climate change, where the weakened state has been unable to overcome the resistance of fossil fuel interests. Instead of strong policies, “market incentives” were used, which made life under stagnating wages even harder, while having no impact on the structural dependencies. Hence, the clean energy build-out did not reduce the amount of carbon emissions. That might change in the medium term, simply for economic efficiency reasons, but likely too little, too late. All of this made a mockery of expertise and rationality, which acknowledged the problem while coming up with a long list of reasons why not to act on it. Against this background, the argument that climate change is not a big deal because we can fix it later once AI has delivered a miracle solution is at least internally consistent.

While Trump and the far right are, well, fascists in a political science sense, their support is not because people became fascists (though some have always been, and it has become OK to say so openly). As Brian Holmes has argued for a long time now, the popularity of the far right is better seen as a Polanyian double movement, people turning to fascism as a way of seeking protection against the ravages of unconstrained capitalism (Trump’s two main points: lower prices and closed borders).

1/ What a time to be alive!

In the US, Trump is re-elected, and in Europe, governments are collapsing (Germany), teetering on the edge of collapse (France), heading toward a last-ditch centrist coalition that nobody believes in (Austria), or have already flipped to the far-right (Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Netherlands).

It’s clear the liberal world order has collapsed and will not recover—not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and embroiled in wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney), but also at the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the status of periphery and has become present in many forms in the center, few will shed tears—except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. The pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order can no longer provide justification and soft power, with the genocide in Gaza the final nail in the coffin.

At the center, the order collapsed because of its own contradictions. Though there are many, they manifest themselves in different ways, but I think they boil down to the neoliberal state being unable to manage two really deep transformations.

3/ It’s quite striking that in seven out of ten states, abortion protection measures won with strong popular support. Even in Florida, 57% of voters backed the measure (but it failed to reach the 60% threshold required for adoption). It’s quite telling that, when considered in isolation, the key point of Harris’s campaign was widely supported, but the overall project of the continuation of the liberal order was rejected.

The left has been completely unprepared for this collapse. Fifty years of neoliberalism have undermined ideas and practices of solidarity and replaced them with a cynical, game-theory view of social interaction as endless competition in zero-sum games. On what new basis solidarity could be rebuilt is entirely unclear to me.

We are off the charts now, and many vulnerable people will suffer. There is a tidal wave of ugliness coming. While liberal wars might be pursued less vigorously now that the Cheneys are in the wilderness for good, neocolonial exploitation will not, creating its own incentives for war. Musk made this very clear in relation to the need to have access to cheap lithium.

But there is no reason to be nostalgic. It’s precisely the charts we had that created the mess we are in.

Fascinating article about the as yet unpredictable changes AI brings to complex knowledge work. Here the case of radiology. The early predictions of displacement of humans by machines have not come to pass (though, as always, they have simply been pushed into the future).

For me, this is the most interesting part, and one that I think applies quite generally.

"Still, I have reservations about AI in radiology, particularly when it comes to education. One of the main promises of AI is that it will handle the “easy” scans, freeing radiologists to concentrate on the “harder” stuff. I bristle at this forecast, since the “easy” cases are only so after we read thousands of them during our training—and for me they’re still not so easy! The only reason my mentors are able to interpret more advanced imaging is that they have an immense grounding in these fundamentals."

If you automate the easy stuff, it's much harder to gain experience necessary to do the harder stuff, This applies to any craft and all creative/knowledge work as an important element of craft to it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey-hinton-nobel-prediction

Ex-Googler Eric Schmidt "My own opinion is that we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we are not organized to do it and yes the needs in this area [AI] will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

This seems to be a fairly prevalent sentiment among the tech crowd.

It's probably impossible to separate the self-serving bullshitting from the actual tech-utopianism beliefs.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/eric-schmidts-risky-bet-on-ai-and

@goncourt It's weird to me that they all bet on GenAI as a step towards AGI. When narrow-AI has been, and will continue to be, useful.

But the larger point is: AI cannot solve "climate" because "climate" is not a knowledge problem. The outlines of the problem and solutions are known, but there is no will to implement bc of vested interests.

Unless you dream of some fantastic, technocratic geoengineering solution, AI will contribute incrementally, rather than as a paradigm shift.

Wikipedia now needs to have a "WikiProject AI Cleanup". They should send Sam Altman a massive bill for all their extra, unnecessary work.

I wouldn't be surprised if, on balance, cleaning up after Generative AI produced more cost than using Generative AI ever saved. Unfortunately, probably not for the same people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup

@aramba I think, generative AI actually *is* an autocorrect. But now it's no longer spelling and grammar, but your imagination that is corrects towards the expected.

Tor browser and sci-hub are absolutely essential to do research these days. Even within academic institutions, let alone outside of them.

It feels like big tech has basically given up and has retreated to indulging in escapist fantasies: space colonization, blockchain, AGI, the network state, metaverse, "hacking death", etc.

None of this solves any problems, or, even works as advertised.

"Evidence that LLMs are reaching a point of diminishing returns — and what that might mean."

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/evidence-that-llms-are-reaching-a

@adoranten I think from a point of view of a history of ideas, longtermism is, indeed, a “vacuous intellectual movement”. But this is missing the point, ideas never become hegemonic by their internal sophistication or coherence. They become hegemonic because they serve a purpose, to provide meaning, foreground problems that can be solved and push into the background those that cannot (ie. climate change is down-graded to existential risk, i.e. only a problem is wipes out the technological infrastructure).

They are, in a way, an organic expression of power as much as a resource to power.

The world would probably be a better place if the absolute amount of computing power would no longer grow. Then development would have to focus on making things more efficient rather than relying on brute force everywhere.

Narrow (domain specific) #AI is powerful, broadly applicable, and potentially socially beneficial.

Broad AI (domain agnostic), like most generative AIs, in contrast, do have very few actual use cases (i.e. applications sustainable without VC subsidies) and is by and large socially harmful.

It's probably a case of confirmation bias, but I had to impulse-buy this (comic) book on how the many ways in which the vision of space colonization makes no practical sense. After reading @pluralistic 's review:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

This is a really great tag-line on the enormous resources used by #AI.

"For all of the fears about AI's brain, it's AI's body that could claim us first."

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-centers-land-grab-google-meta-openai-amazon-2023-12

Went to see a superblock in Barcelona. Given how much they feature as urbanism of the future, they are amazingly simple. Take an intersection, block traffic in all four directions and you have a square. Plant trees, add some tables and benches. That's basically it. Replace cars with trees and don't privatize the resulting space. All you need, and all that is usually missing, is political will.

@rasmusfleischer Spotify moves from "freedom of choice to freedom from choice". I guess this applies to most algorithmically curated services.

@rasmusfleischer i'll be there too!