Admittedly, it is a bit of a stretch to compare a fictional terrorist with substance abuse issues and the endless self-fulfilling hype about the large language model tools collectively marketed and promoted as “artificial intelligence”.
Or maybe it isn’t. There’s a certain amount of monomaniacal obsession in both cases, as well as a dedication to a ‘pure’ revolution that will undoubtedly rack up a higher body count than a more calculated approach to rebellion.
Where the analogy breaks down is that I don’t doubt Saw Gerrera’s sincerity for a moment. He absolutely believes in getting high on rocket fuel fumes as an expression of revolutionary zeal. On the other hand, the folks advocating that I just rip off the mask and huff down as much AI gas as my system can stomach are not without some degree of vested interest in profiting from late stage capitalism’s latest perfect scam.
Not everyone advocating this particular brand of digital rocket fuel is one of the obscenely wealthy tech bro oligarchs who benefit the most from AI-driven and enhanced products dominating the Internet, but – tech oligarch or not – everyone wants a piece of the action.
I probably don’t really have the luxury of being a contrarian at this point, but I also have a hard time overcoming my contrarian impulses. Every time I’ve seen yet another abstraction layer added to what was once an essentially anarchistic distributed digital network, I’ve seen the content on that network get dumbed down a little more and more effectively packaged as a delivery system that bypasses what little remaining capacity we collectively retain for critical thought.
AI runs on top of social networking the same way that social networking runs on top of the World Wide Web, the same way the Web runs on top of the real internet. Somewhere in that stack of abstractions, ten square inches or so of touch-sensitive screen became the preferred means of receiving any kind of information at all. Anything too complex to fit in that real estate may as well not exist.
And now we are going to let algorithms decide how best to use that real estate. Wow… what could possibly go wrong?
We are being both gassed and gaslighted. The people best equipped to push back on the potential risks of the expansion of AI technology, the digital professionals whose labor make any sort of “internet” possible, have largely been convinced that their ability to continue to have careers depends on embracing this technology.
Which is probably and regrettably true.
But it’s not quite too late to put the mask back on and get the fumes out of your head. It’s far past time that the ghouls and goa’uld that had ringside seats at Trump’s coronation were held to some sort of accounting and some sort of regulation. Rushing forward with technology that can turn our entire digital public space into an analytically tuned, consumerism-driven shared hallucination would be dangerous enough in a regulated environment. In the current environment… it is a likely recipe for disaster.