📺️ There Is No AI, Really (It’s Just People), with Jaron Lanier
Part of the ideology that makes AI into a creature instead of a collaboration also wants to think of bits as being this ethereal thing that’s free and infinite…
You show me a bit that didn’t involve work. You show me a bit that didn’t disperse heat…Look at data centers. When you make enough bits, they take up more energy than anything. Information is physical or it’s nothing.
You can think of large language model AI as a whole bunch of people’s work combined into this single document. But why do people want it to be a creature? You’re a young man. You think you’re the center of the universe. Of course you think you’re making God.
Jaron is one of the most consistent, smart, sane voices in tech and the tech+society space. There’s not only cybernetics, AI, and VR in this interview, but a short discussion around hopepunk that never uses that word (around 40:00-45:00).
Promises Made, Promises Kept: The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Absolutely Looks Like Shit Now
If everyone in the United States weren’t living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf.
…annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.