Now that AI is really starting to take off, there are a lot of breathless words being written about its implications, words that can be anywhere from glowing and fawning to foreboding and stricken. There is also a lot of really great and insightful things being observed about it coming from various corners.
For now I just wanted to point out that to make this technology work and be functional on a collective level, it has to ultimately be worshipped in various ways, much like our other collective central technologies like money and the multitude of commodities and resources we consume.
The central conceit of AI is that it is like human intelligence, and one has to treat it as such in interactions with it, as an article of faith. Never mind all of the strange and proprietary ways that it is developed and how it actually emerges and ultimately functions.
How it is designed and called into motion on a substrata of manipulated electrical impulses for instance, taking place within a built infrastructure, which is then subsumed into the category of built environment which must be ultimately collectively directed.
And which, in our present moment, consists of a gargantuan and voracious process of material wealth accumulation and energy usage, which is so powerful and irresistible a force that no one individual, nation, or even empire can unilaterally change its course, even though that we all know that it is killing us.
This is fetishization par excellence: one's very individual self and corresponding theory of mind for the other is located within what is an incredibly complex and broad social and cultural process that is dependent on an entire galaxy of individuals producing it.
Not a phenomenon that is ultimately limited to AI or even material built resources by any means. In a way fetishization affects individuals and nations on different levels too. But I do want to resist that collective and relentless tendency to isolate and decontextualize objects of power, placing them on pedestals to be worshipped uncritically.
