Hard to overstate the importance of this point. However shallow a fool like Musk might be, what we're seeing can't be explained away as simply a smash and grab for more corporate expropriation but needs to be understood in terms of ideology.
My friend Helen Beetham is a very astute critic of AI. While primarily researching digital education, her substack posts are packed with sarcasm-loaded insights about the whole AI shit show. Uncompromising analysis plus bitter irony:
I wrote 'Resisting AI' (subtitled 'An Anti-fascist approach to Artificial Intelligence') to help preempt the kind of convergence of far right politics and the tech sector that we are waking up to today. The struggle against fascistic solutionism continues. https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai
Unlike actual clouds, which transport life-giving moisture from the seas to the land, the AI cloud sucks up scarce water resources. It shouldn't be called 'The Cloud' it should be called 'The Drought', and we should say "that large language model runs in The Drought" 🏜️
Prediction: the UK government will push AI into public services, the services will get even shoddier, everyone will blame the immigrants. Meanwhile data centres will ingest entire electricity grids while AI fails to save us from climate change.
Educators spend a lot of time focusing on how to restructure assessments because of ChatGPT but less time thinking about why education as a whole is vulnerable to AI in the first place, and what that prompts us to think about restructuring our systems of teaching and learning.
Reliable AI notetaking about "potentially life-changing choices" is sketchy enough, but a social work AI system that "proposes actions that human workers might not have considered" is a profoundly bad idea ☠️
I'm at the Centre for Commons Organising tomorrow, asking: Will AI fix public services? If I'm an educator but I don't embrace AI, am I a Luddite? Did Francis Galton invent deep learning? Will AI save us from climate change? Does decomputing mean I have to get rid of my laptop?
