It's a Heartache
what I regret about the 90s — present toxicity
I said this in reply to a writer who is being attacked for experimenting and publicly wondering if AI might be valuable. It's probably clearer than I have been in the past on the subject.
You need to bear in mind I spent a good decade promoting tech from the early 90s to rhe mid-noughties in community development and another promting cloud and later AI in government business development.
Also, that David Gerrold has written some really significant and charming fiction about (general) AI celebrated in a way I can only dream of.
But he's involved in the rhetoric of the arguments. We all are. That's the nature of the present. We're living it, not the past or the future. Only the present can get out of hand.
Like quoting myself!
Please forgive me for removing the context to which I am replying. I think it's kind of obvious, but then my obvious is often someone else's joke.
”It's true this tech could be seen as a synthesiser, whose music sits beside and within other instruments now. We're in the 80s of AI use now, by that metaphor.
”The synthesiser did not unleash our creativity. It didn't democratise music. The cadence of sentences used, David Gerrold, indicate you were ignoring your own mention of what does liberate us: the crayon. Art is already free.
”The whole internet is already selling our data and attention back to ourselves. We who developed the forums like this and saw the value in community groups now feel conflicted.
”The spinning reference you used—not to get pejorative or disrespectful but it seemed like a sneer to me—ignores the sweatshops which make hand spinning and knitting valuable and ethical now. It's not the invention but the use to which automation is put which makes AI a corporate tool whose purpose is not liberation but a opportunist's notion of making creativity more efficient. Their aims are not our own.
”The programming I do nowadays is for a teacosy festival, not promoting the false hope of liberation by billionaires. Whose datacentres and warehousing are sweatshops.”
My biggest beef about AI is that for all its grand theft, fuckup of the planet, and corruption of democracy, it's as untrustable as any compulsive liar. That we are being shoved into its clutches when every spell checker, no matter how intrusive, has a vocabulary no greater than a junk-food ad, rots my boots. But I love your "Amazing Gramaphone" entry in that marvy tea cosy festival, and if I can call dibs on it, I am. DM me, please.