The idea appears to be to let computers exponentially proliferate some of the tasks they excel at: numbers, statistics, labelling people, copying, collecting data and mass surveillance. Rather than sit down and talk about how we boost the values we as humans wish to proliferate: compassion, love, care, connection and belonging.
Few are talking about how the former is antithetical to the latter.
I’m not saying ”stop using computers”, I’m saying ”stop letting computers assume the leadership position”. Computers can act as aids for compassion, love, care, connection and belonging. Think of games, text-to-speech and long-distance communication. But computers arrive there by instruction code from humans. Not the other way around.
The more alarming truth is this: computers can be used to destroy compassion, love, care, connection and belonging much faster than we can keep up with building it. Sometimes that destruction is with intent, but often it is oblivious.
/previously on Fedi
For fifty years computers were used for their purpose: to compute exact, predictable and explainable responses to exact, interpretable queries and inputs.
Then, in what human timekeeping referred to as the early 21st century, the most exploitative classes of the human race decided that the best use of computers was to compute inexact - yet semantically believable - responses to inexact human phrasing. Each inexact response was different for multiple identical queries, and easily manipulated through more inexact phrasing.
And they chose to call those responses intelligence. We can only presume the decades prior, trusting computers for exact calculations, forced them into a delusional state of mind. Probabilistic word salad was treated as divine instruction. As further evidence of this delusion, we can refer to the sequence of events that followed.
To produce vast amounts of ’intelligence’ required extreme amounts of energy, causing consumption to skyrocket. This was during a time when it would appear that the human race were well aware that they actually needed to do the opposite: reduce energy consumption to minimise the effects of their climate crisis and save themselves.
Needless to say, much of human civilisation collapsed into a smoking pile of confusion. After their demise, Earth was again able to thrive, after we removed the heaps of harmful waste orbitting around it.
/posted on Fedi.
Design is a great skill to have. But to exercise that skill fully you also need to know why you are designing and how you can put yourself in positions where you can pursue that why.
Our thumbs moving across screens. Day in. Day out. Our energy devoted to serving the machines and their overlords. Reality itself being distorted by virtual, augmented and generated alternatives.
The overlords don't even have to hide their ambitions anymore. Whatever they speak is gospel.
The Matrix was not a warning of a future to come where we are hooked up to machines, emptied of our energy to serve the desired immortality of our own oppressors.
It was a call to wake up and pull the cord.
In a recent post I first wrote “third-world countries”, considered changing it to developing countries, then edited to “Global South”.
There is a lot of baggage in language that imperfectly labels entire groups of countries, while also carrying with it many negative connotations.
Then I came across Dayo Olopad’s op-ed talking instead about a shift in thinking to “fat” and “lean” countries. While perhaps I would have preferred the use of “bloated” rather than “fat”, Olopad’s insights are worth sharing:
« “Lean” societies approach consumption and production with scarcity in mind. In the so-called least developed nations of sub-Saharan Africa, where the gross national income averages just $2,232 per capita, populations are young and hungry — at times for food, but mostly for opportunity. Nothing can be taken for granted or wasted. But resource constraints have provoked an astonishing bounty of homegrown solutions to the problems philanthropists like Mr. Gates address with charity. If necessity is the mother of invention, lean economies have a distinct advantage. »
It should be obvious by now that “fat” economies need to learn to be more like the “lean” countries.
« As the old adjectives about Africa — “hopeless,” “war torn,” “impoverished”— fade, fat economies must stop assuming that poor countries should mimic them and instead embrace their models for social innovation and efficiency. The post-crash ethos of doing more with less is essential in modern Africa. And for philanthropists like Mr. Gates and world leaders who have committed to solving big problems, lean thinking is imperative. »
Massor med bra tips i detta avsnitt av the Compassion Podcast med Dr. Nate Klemp, författare av OPEN.