Kill the AI in your head
The AI wars are back at the top of the news cycle. Seems like a new front has opened in the struggle for global AI dominance between China and America, and the American side is freaking out. It seems like China is now in the lead. Apparently, a Chinese company has been able to engineer a much cheaper AI model that competes at the same level as — or even out-competes (loud gasp!) — the top-notch stuff that America has to offer. All this right after the leading tech lords announced, with Donald Trump’s blessing, the launch of a new program that was supposed to crush the world with American AI: Stargate. Stargate — referencing a film about a demonic alien overlord who enslaves humanity. These dweebs can’t help themselves.
The hysteria around this Chinese breakthrough is filled with talk about the threat to America’s national security…calls for a redoubling of efforts to win the global AI war. It’s all very typical…all very Surveillance Valley. Computer technology is an extension of state military power…it always was and continues to be. My immediate response is: down with AIs. These tools — which ingest information to mimic human behavior, making it look like they’re sentient and creative but only really rearranging what was already — won’t help us live better, more fulfilling lives. This tech, which ingests the entirety of human knowledge and cultural output, and concentrates into the hands of a tiny elite that owns these machines, is meant to break society apart…to shake out all the wealth that’s trapped in decentralized pockets and to plunder it without giving anything back. This technology will no doubt reconfigure life to a new normal that will be worse than what it is today, there is no doubt about it.
Underneath it all, this AI tech rush is just another speculative bubble. It’s being pumped to feed the stock market casino — the true engine of the American oligarchic economy. That’s why a lot of people are freaking out right now. The Chinese AI success has deflated this NATO-aligned AI bubble so quickly that some are worried it might pop permanently. They’re panicking out there. If you kill a companies on the stock market, it’ll die a real physical death, too!
All this panicking will no doubt lead to the U.S. government — the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA — to pump some money into the sector. So everything will be ok for the AI boosters. I wouldn’t worry too much.
This is what everyone is freaked out about at this very moment: that American AIs might not be the most cutting edge has caused stock market casino investors to flee NVIDIA, the chipmaker staking its future on AI computing
It’s late and I’m tired. My daughter’s sick and so I’ve been taking care of her all day. But I feel compelled to comment, because…well…because I’ve been getting interested in the internet and our degraded politics of technology again.
To start off, I guess I’m bummed that China is essentially following America's lead in this degraded robot arms race. I had hoped that with China, being based on a supposedly different cultural and economic model, might look at America and the dead-end consumer capitalism and industrial civilization that America represents, and attempt to follow a different path for development…to come up with a different measure of what it means to create a society worth living in. But it doesn’t seem to be the case. China seems to be plunging headlong into a hyper-industrial, hyper-cybernetic, hyper-consumerist way of life — obsessed with efficiency, obsessed with computers, obsessed with robotic life, AIs. The country that supposedly opposes America is pursuing the same model for life. It really is sad. A wasted opportunity. The Soviet Union, where I was born, also wasted its opportunity to find a different path for society and instead aped the American industrialized approach…aped, and failed.
Back to the this whole issue of national security — if the ruling class here was really serious about American greatness and being number one in the world, it would scrap this stupid arms race tomorrow. It would plow all its efforts into engineering a society that slows things down — a society that uses less energy, stops producing so much garbage and toxic waste, and uses existing technology to give people time…time with their family and friends, time with their children, time to pursue interests outside the narrow confines of an economy that gives people no leash to live at all. Our lords and saviors would aim to build a world of fewer bullshit jobs, a world where people aren’t alienated from the processes that sustain them, a world that isn’t based on eradicating all living life on this planet… But we know that this is not gonna happen. I’d say the people in power are as stuck in this system as the rest of us. In fact, they’re more stuck. Think about how many truly wealthy people there are in America. And think about how uncreative they are with their wealth — outside of conspicuous consumption, innovative tax evasion schemes, and the funding of an odd museum or whatever…they are doing absolutely nothing interesting with it. It’s all very conservative…very cautious…meant to keep the status quo.
So no one’s coming to rescue us from the AI demon. We have to do it ourselves. We have to reject the cult of efficiency. We have to be overturn the cyborg cult. We have to embrace life and death, in all its disorganized pointlessness. And we have to do it leading by example —meaning that we have to kill the AI inside of us first before we do anything else. That’s much more difficult than blowing up a pipeline or data center. It might be the hardest thing that humans have ever had to do.
—Yasha
PS: I really should work on reissuing Surveillance Valley with a new updated epilogue focusing on the final stage of internet weapon development: the AI arms race.
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I'm looking forward to your reissue of your book. I use it in a course I teach on the cold war.
AI has always appeared like a low-priority thing for humanity to focus on. A few years ago I'd always dismiss my friend obessed with it. We can't even feed everyone. It's clearly more of a pump the stock scheme which nearly all "products" have become.