Notices by danmcquillan (danmcquillan@kolektiva.social)

the Cloud is an infrastructure takeover

Hands up who's shocked by the intersection of racism, misogyny and AI policy.
"Hester, who has worked on artificial intelligence as part of his IT business, has previously said he has had “some quite long conversations with Rishi about AI”.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/16/sunak-under-pressure-to-say-how-many-times-he-has-met-tory-donor-frank-hester

I'll be hosting @GoldsmithsUoL online roundtable on 'AI & the Climate Crisis' with Boxi Wu, Fieke Jansen, Sebastián Lehuedé & Pat Brodie; four speakers who are sure to put forward some radical perspectives! Tue 19th March, 6.30-8.00pm UK time. Join us! https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=14934

Accenture and the racist Rotterdam algorithm https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/suspicion-machines/, Deloitte and Denmark's far-right backed welfare surveillance https://www.wired.com/story/algorithms-welfare-state-politics/ - it seems it's not just Big Tech but Big Consulting firms that have a social alignment problem👺

@atomless @anildash Well yes, I don't disagree. These systems propagate a normativity that is borderline eugenicist. But getting this across also seems to me to require a fusion of analysis and affect, which is what I liked about Anil's post

I think the most compelling aspect of @anildash's post 'Today's AI is unreasonable' is the way it pairs a critique of gen-AI's unpredictable and unreproducible answers with the abusive and controlling mindset of the tech tycoons behind it https://www.anildash.com//2023/06/08/ai-is-unreasonable/

'A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco' https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless-taxi-fire-vandalized-video-san-francisco-china-town - no reported motive but "The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators" #luddism

'The Rise of Anti-Capitalist Neurodiversity: Robert Chapman's ''Empire of Normality'' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoBQ6q56fJE - interesting and important episode of @acidhorizonpod covering the history and present of eugenics and its relation to normality, neurodiversity & modes of production

Generative AI has taken the reproducibility crisis of science and turned it into a core feature

The Google/DeepMind LLM seems to be programmed with pro-AI climate propaganda - that first screen smells of guardrails not stochastic text regression.

@why0hy thanks! (from the facial recognition capital of Brexitland)

@why0hy sorry, catching up with the latest: what's the Council's outrageous behaviour?

Informative episode of This Week in Machine Learning covering Glaze and its followup, Nightshade. Refreshing to hear a tech person who's taking the side of the people (artists) against Big Tech: '
Nightshade: Data Poisoning to Fight Generative AI with Ben Zhao' https://twimlai.com/podcast/twimlai/nightshade-data-poisoning-to-fight-generative-ai/

At the same time that UK political parties vie in their condemnation of the Post Office scandal, they unite in their promotion of AI as the answer to tricky social problems. This means that, in effect, they are arguing for more of the same;
https://web.archive.org/web/20240118103826/https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/AI-will-create-a-thousand-Post-Office-scandals

Science for the People poster from 1971 - "Computer workers - join with other workers; make computers serve the people!"

Wow, what a truly terrible idea. The last thing that AI is a solution for is underlying structural injustices (see my book and others for the receipts). Keep generative AI out of patients lives!

new blog post: 'AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism' https://danmcquillan.org/ai_thatcherism.html

It's not time to professionalise algorithmic auditing, it's time to challenge the emergence of audit-washing
#AI #grift

Inhuman-in-the-loop #AI #Gaza //
The Habsora system enables the army to run a “mass assassination factory”... A human eye “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.”
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

AI isn't sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. And, like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable.
#AI #Thatcher