This is the best episode of TrueAnon since the The Game series, and the best interview relating to "AI" in its current form you'll find on any podcast.
They interview Douglas Rushkoff "to discuss what's real and what's fake about the AI publicity push, the next phase of the internet, and human connection in the oppressive techno-future."
Rushkoff is the perfect guest for this topic on this show. Brace and Liz are incredibly insightful on the issue.
Go listen to it. If someone has a non-patreon'd link, please do share.
I specifically can't get over Rushkoff's point about how "AI" as it's being used is - instead of allowing us to see the humanity behind the machine - is instead conforming us the actual people to be more machine-like, through things like auto-correct and auto-complete algorithms, we are being nudged and incentivized and prodded into thinking less, relying on the AI more, for the sake of endless efficiency, at the cost of creativity and any language beyond the most default efficient way of speaking or thinking.
"AI" isn't intelligent, or sentient, or sapient, but it may as well be, for how it only exists to - as a technology and concept - get human beings to shave themselves down for the sake of the AI's ease.
Every time we use it, we help it far more than it helps us, and it's not even really helping us...
GO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE, IT'S INCREDIBLE
I’ll have to give TrueAnon another go to listen to this. The notion of AI being a thought terminating device (excellent thread btw) resonates deeply with me - from playing with GPT4 at work, I find myself thinking less about what is right, to what I should be prompting the model to generate that feels right. And given the model can’t reason - it can only ever produce believable looking text - I’m trapped in a loop of trying to refine nonsense. Even using it as a sounding board to try and spark ideas from, it distracts from effectively writing cohesive, well reasoned prose for technical documentation.
When you consider the deleterious effects of GPS navigation on the hippocampus/spatial memory, the mind boggles as to what technology under capitalism is going to do to everyone’s brains in the next 30 years.
the mind boggles as to what technology under capitalism is going to do to everyone’s brains in the next 30 years
Unless something not yet factored in pleasantly surprises me, I fully expect "chatbot brain" to be a thing where people are expected to follow a narrow(er) comformist communication script at school, at work, even in their personal lives.
"Redditese" is already a thing offline and in the living world around me where people say Reddity shit like "it's almost as if"
at the start of sentences, out loud and without shame. 
the deleterious effects of GPS navigation on the hippocampus/spatial memory
welp, time to buy an atlas and go back to the old way.
That's not necessarily a bad idea especially if T H E C L O U D continues to enshittify once-useful services.
Looking forward to my FALGSC great great grandchildren having mushy paste brains but also being much happier than me by every metric
hey don't mind me just posting a very interesting link to a 101 minute sound file here
How do you download the audio file from this site? EDIT: I figured it out, it's line 72 in the source code
It comes to - and it's not fair, and it's externalized - it's personal and community responsibility. The more embedded you are in a live community of real human beings, then the less vulnerable you will be to capitalist AIs, anti-social AIs, mind-control AIs, even the fake news AIs don't matter so much.
That was pretty great and interesting.
That bit towards the end about people "with the spectrum" and how "that kind of thinking" can be used, I guess, in a very cold, detached and unempathetic way, was a bit weird? I get the general idea of it, and I think there's truth to it somewhere but it was weirdly worded. I'm not sure if any of them are autistic, so it sounded a bit strange to me, could be interpreted in a broad "autistic people are cold/cruel/robotic" cliché which I'm not a fan of, but still I think I get what they meant.
Also gah does anyone know what the music is from at 94:51 (transition to the wrap-up after the guest leaves)? I want to know if there's an actual full track somewhere of this is just a few synth chords done for the show, but I liked it.
Also gah does anyone know what the music is from at 94:51 (transition to the wrap-up after the guest leaves)? I want to know if there's an actual full track somewhere of this is just a few synth chords done for the show, but I liked it.
Yung Chomsky does pretty much all of the music, and posts the tracks on his soundcloud but right now the most recent track posted is from 6 months ago. He usually does a collection at the end of the year with them all.
That was a really thoughtful and fascinating conversation, but because I'm the way that I am, the only part I'm going to remember is when Liz described Musk as being a frog in a pig suit.
instead of allowing us to see the humanity behind the machine - is instead conforming us the actual people to be more machine-like, through things like auto-correct and auto-complete algorithms, we are being nudged and incentivized and prodded into thinking less, relying on the AI more, for the sake of endless efficiency, at the cost of creativity and any language beyond the most default efficient way of speaking or thinking
The brief hype wave that reached Hexbear a few months ago where some totally-leftist bazingas were saying, to sum up, "actually human meat computers are just a more primitive, squishier, and more inferior ChatGPT anyway, materialistically offer nothing of value over this liberating new technology that is only replacing jobs done by spoiled labor aristocrats, so why are you emotional about it? I don't care about artists, writers, teachers, or other not real workers, I want cheaper treats"
now sounds like it was pre-emptive merry skipping down the still-unfinished road the techbros are still paving for the rest of us. 
If you insist, I can direct message you some of the names I remember from back then. I'm not sure what you want from them, though.
My point was to bring up such arguments were made here on this ostensibly leftist space that is supposed to be about worker solidarity. No matter how I disliked their takes, my intention isn't to start up a months-later brigade against them, thus why I omitted names from my post.
EDIT: Fine, screw it. I sent you a personal message with one of the most glaring examples of everything I summed up in my post, all in one thread from months ago.
"I don't care about artists, writers, teachers, or other not real workers, I want cheaper treats"
It's really a bummer this sentiment has been the ethos of The Net since its inception. Makers of treats are not valued, treat are valued but only so far as they are free. Makers of things can barely even get something as simple as a "like" or whatever, but people will swipe their creation and then demand they make more treats. Machine Learning technologies and other artificial intelligence related tools are cracking this idea into turbo overdrive. I feel particularly bad for teachers as so many online teachers are just marketers who want to sell knowledge rather than the real-deal teacher who just want to the infinite reach of the net to help educate people.
I think about this image so often. I can't find the book I would love to read it but this single image I think captures my views on leftist thought and tech.. It pretty much sums up why I hate technology under capitalism. The makers of treats would thrive, vibe, and probably make more and better treats if tech didn't hollow them out like it does under capitalism.
i know i plug TMK a lot but they have a similarly themed episode if this is speaking to you
https://podbay.fm/p/this-machine-kills/e/1674161617
- How AI Makes Living Labor Undead
1 hour 19 minutes Posted Jan 19, 2023 at 3:53 pm.
SHOW NOTES
We spend more time talking about the political economy of AI – the production and application of AI within a capitalist system and how it might (and should) differ within a socialist or communist system. We pay particular attention to discussing the growing and specialized industries for producing, supporting, propping up, and stepping in for AI in a variety of applications. Living labor creates the machinery of dead labor, which then acts as an agent of capital to discipline and dominate living labor, making it more machine-like, thus turning the living into the undead.
Stuff we reference
••• Seven questions to ask about AI https://maxread.substack.com/p/seven-questions-to-ask-about-ai
••• Human_Fallback https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/
••• The Worldwide Data Annotation Tools Industry is Expected to Reach $13.2 Billion by 2030 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220824005423/en/The-Worldwide-Data-Annotation-Tools-Industry-is-Expected-to-Reach-13.2-Billion-by-2030---ResearchAndMarkets.com
Great episode. I have a lot of respect for Rushkoff and how he thinks about these issues. He has come full circle from internet guru to silicon valley critic, and he has not lost his credibility or heart in any of it. I wonder what the moment was for him where he realized “we’ve lost the internet, shit is getting worse, the baddies are winning, and the baddies want me to speak at their conferences not because they welcome my critique, because they want to debrief the opposition”.
I also feel a weird kinship that both Rushkoff and I listen to TrueAnon while in bed with the phone under the pillow.
Great episode, single complaint: the guest sounds enough like Brace that sometimes I think it's just him with a cold.
The hype is basically already over. They weren't able to pump it for years like self driving cars.
It's become pretty clear to just people that chatgpt and art are things to fuck setting with and that's about it. A novelty.
Job that already exists: solving captchas for fractions of a penny each just to let thousands of AI bots shill online.
Why can’t human consciousness be a function of its environment
I don't think that was ruled out as much as the argument was that under a reductive capitalist-realism model, such arguments can and are twisted and weaponized against creative workers (and workers in general).
Metaphorically, I think it's like how it's entirely unhelpful to point at an endangered species and say it's just a mass of carbon and other common component elements when that species' current situation is that it's about to be annihiliated entirely for the sake of the corporation bulldozing its habitat.
