Toolmen

Great piece from Mandy Brown (as always). A few of my fav excerpts:

what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful. AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousness—a prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be...because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.

Over and over in the pursuit of quantified intelligence we see errors of logic, miscalculations, manipulations of data, and overt and outright fraud

chattering bots that speak both fact and falsehood in the same servile and confident tone, their makers unconcerned with the difference.

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

Everything in this post is :chefs-kiss:

The more likely scenario, and the one that’s been exhibited time and again with automation technology in previous centuries, is that the work that remains will be deskilled, de-spirited, stripped of creativity and joy, and granted the meanest remuneration.