AI, as a very broad technological concept, has a very broad set of applications that will continue to expand and evolve as the technology is developed and applied. However, as a high-value and resource-intensive technology, it lends itself naturally to consolidation and concentration, and as such will be used in certain dominant ways depending on where the economic power and resources are concentrated.
We have to be careful here though. This doesn't have to mean fully-automated dystopia. There are ways to concentrate power so that power can be intentionally re-distributed in broader and broadly effective ways, which influences how technology manifests socio-politically and economically, and how it is ultimately put into practice. Ian Welsh - one writer I repeatedly return to for his particular gift for distilling complex and challenging subjects into clear and direct pieces, all the while accomplishing the difficult part in the process: getting it right - explains how the technology is developing very differently in China.
I'm not going to explore here whether these differing historical-geographical developments will lead to their relative successes or disasters, and I won't say that China doesn't have its own unique troubles particular to its historical character, as much as you can isolate that particular character from the greater world system anyway. But it is certainly useful to be able to observe contrasting lines of development and their relative effects and effectiveness.
I still have this huge piece on AI brewing which will seek to address some of these larger issues, which gets bigger and more complicated every day as the technology continues to develop and more stories come out on it, which is kind of a pain in the butt and an albatross honestly. But for now I just wanted to turn to a particular phenomenon that is pretty interesting.
In this brief post, I'm going to focus on the Western approach. Here you have all of these wildly varying speculations about what AI can do and accomplish, and then a certain band of dominant applications where it is really displaying its efficacy as it manifests in actually-existing society in the West.
Structurally, the prevailing pattern in the West has been an intensifying and accelerating process of rolling expropriation, which beginning with colonization, made for continuous acts of robbery which had to - roughly paraphrasing Hannah Arendt again - continuously be repeated lest the whole process break down. And now the process is indeed breaking down, as there is less and less weak and vulnerable outer to rob which hasn't collapsed into flame and chaos anyway, and the robbers have had to take more of their share from the inner, while dreaming of pillaging the bigger stronger powers in the outer but not actually carrying out that dream, to condense a complicated story into so many words.
This process came to mind recently because I've repeatedly observed my site being scraped. This is crude inference; I don't actually have the technical skills to inquire as to whether this was actually the case, but there have been a number of instances when I've seen a huge amount of single pageviews for a large amount of posts all at once. If it really was scraped for AI, good luck to the AI in making sense of this stuff; that AI is going to get a bit weirder.
But it doesn't matter whether my stuff was personally scraped or not. We know that this is happening all over the Internet, and that AI systems are hoovering up all of the data they can get, leading to various problems like fights over digital property, and then a particular kind of garbage in, garbage out issue, where the AI runs out of raw input and begins taking in AI output. Which got me thinking.
Every next technological revolution we have comes in the context of Western political economy: in which waves of self-interested, state-backed private actors advance contemporary technological suites through a process of expropriation, in which they appropriate first natural and indigenous resources and then later on appropriate collectively produced and public resources in subsequent waves, destroying the integrity of those resources in the process while producing a fresh wave of initially public resources, which are steadily enclosed and captured, socializing the costs and privatizing the gains.
This is also a telescoping process, in which the window for the even distribution of public resources constricts and shortens in time with each subsequent wave. There was a very brief period when AI tools were more broadly distributed to tinker with, before they were rapidly rolled up, and are now quickly being siloed off into proprietary systems, raising costs socially, while also the sclerotic technical monopolies brute force the additional energy requirements without a more thorough innovation in operating efficiency, so that energy and data requirements are rising steeply.
There are all kinds of dynamics to be analyzed in there, but what I'm getting at is this limited observation: that we can see the bots scrape our socially produced digital materials, passing by like hungry ghosts, our remaining scraps of digital production stripped away and chucked into the great food processors as more grist for corporate AI slop, to be distributed through highly centralized corporate troughs, a mudslide of content slurry we didn't ask for, giving us essentially nothing of substance in return for our unending time and energy and attention, in compensation for the Internet commons they have been in the process of destroying in the previous wave.
