Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal, describes the marketing game that big tech is playing with “AI” as an umbrella term in this recently viral Instagram reel from ActNatural.py. In summary: AI as a marketing term is running cover for the construction of a monopoly on compute, and the expansion of both capitalist and state-sponsored surveillance.
The reel’s original source is the above YouTube video from June 25, 2024, where Whittaker receives the Helmut Schmidt Future Award from The New Institute. The entire video is worth watching, as is the following video from GamersNexus which makes the same point from the perspective of the consumer hardware sector:
GamersNexus has been tracking the impact of the AI explosion on the prices of consumer parts for gaming and PC enthusiasts, and the picture is pretty grim. Beyond a deep dive on fabrication process and the impact on prices caused by the shift from consumer to enterprise hardware, the video describes a potential endgame following the burst of the AI bubble where the glut of massive AI datacenters are converted to subscription-based compute, with retail parts prices so high that full-featured home computers become out of reach for the average consumer.
Follow those two shots with a chaser from Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s personal YouTube channel, no less, with a reading of his Hollywood Reporter op-ed from last June:
Gordon-Levitt’s point, and that of his co-signatories to the Creators Coalition on AI, is a soft version of: workers are owed the value that we create. A W for comrade Joe, but I’m afraid that using copyright law isn’t going to be enough to combat the world-historical theft of human knowledge and art that is being perpetrated by AI companies. Disney would rather align itself with OpenAI, embrace Sora, and take its competitors to court, creating yet another walled garden, than ensure an equal computational field for everyone.
The purpose of a system is what it does. So what is AI actually doing? Far from nonsense predictions of imminent AGI that will either save or doom the world, AI-as-reality is pillaging the digital commons for the benefit of a few massive corporations, destroying worker power and the barrier between public and private life, and hedging its bets with an unprecedented buildout of datacenters and compute power to rent to the highest genocidal bidder — and that’s not even getting into the negative externalities.
So what can we do about the rise of AI, and what are the alternatives? I’m looking forward to exploring these questions in the new year.
Featured image via The New Institute website
