Anatomy of an AI System (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Anatomy of an AI System (2018)

anatomyof.ai

99 pointselie_CH14 comments

Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining:

> Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce, science, politics and power.

This purple language is evocative of, something? Like ya, we live in a globalized economy, things are connected, what of it? Is this supposed to be a brilliant insight or just a poetic restating of the obvious?

I am so used to articles with a meaningless header image that I totally skipped that the map they're talking about is right at the top of the page. My brain filtered it out. After going back and looking at it, I think the map is pretty cool and would be great if it were dynamic and navigable in a leaflet container or something of the sort.

But I agree I got tired of the prose about a third of the way in. I appreciate it, and can tell what they are getting at but I think regular hacker news readers are in a demographic that is already keenly aware of the interconnected nature of raw material extraction, supply chains, applied and theoretical sciences etc. I mean it's in our nature to process these thoughts because we're always looking for some missing connection, a forgotten or undiscovered niche, (edit to add, not to forget the human and environmental impacts of all of this as another user mentioned) etc etc.

I do think there's plenty of folk who might see this as eye opening, especially the average consumer for whom devices just materialise out of money. I imagine the philosophical angle would be more thought provoking for someone who hasn't sat down and thought about it a whole heap.

(second and final edit to add - on more thought I think if they made the map dynamic, and put the prose on little markers, that would be way more impactful to me at least as I think the spatial context would add a ton of value).

If it feels obvious, you may be missing the point. Or else, you may simply be rationally contemplating the existence of the lesson without actually considering the lesson itself.

If the document is "supposed" to be anything, it is as an entryway into contemplative empathy with the full-scale complex system we inhabit, the wonder that a civilization can be organized to the point where this is possible, and the explicit recognition of what experiences a loss when you want a gain. It is to understand that the comforts we've come to feel entitled to are built by extractive processes, whether material (mining, etc.) or otherwise (labor exploitation, opportunity costs, etc.).

The real point of it for me is the framing. It's the idea that any object, tangible or intangible, and be analyzed in this way because everything has multiple dimensions of relations linking it to every other thing eventually. It's the equivalent of being able to pick up the graph of human relations by a single point and letting all other relations branch from that point like a tree. There's obviously root nodes that are more interesting than others just as there are more spanning trees more interesting than all the others.

It's a Factorio prerequisite chart of all the things you need to build before you can build Alexa. Although the pentagram plus seemingly unrelated fractal and u.s. wage diagrams make it look a bit strange. Needs more quantum mechanics and Gödel.

It seems it's supposed to evoke how everything is causally connected. Unfortunately, just pointing that out doesn't really do much without other things to connect to; "everything is connected" is just a truism without tying it back to something that flies in the face of that fact. Cybernetics is cool, but it's meant to be applied, not some hypothetical interesting factoid like pop-sci quantum mechanics.

Do you really think that child slavery for sourcing cobalt is "obvious" to most iPhone users? I doubt that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJ8me22NVs&list=PLnUeRIXMDq...

I can't speak on the technical side of things, but that graphic is beautiful. Might even frame and hang it up.

I only got partway through this. I want to say to the author:

Oh my god just stop taking yourself so seriously. Really. You don't need to do this. You're trying waaaay too hard.

It's opaque and mysterious and lovecraftian to you because you clearly spend all of your time making cool graphics and drawing tenuous metaphors between 16th century monks, pharaohs, and jeff bezos. I assure you, for everyone who works in a lithium mine or amazon datacenter doing the actual thing, it's actually pretty obvious. you just, you don't need to write this maam.

And also google "commodity fetishism" sometime.

It does look cool though. Wonderful typography and illustrations. I have a nitpick which is that it's a little bit monochrome, a pop of color (maybe a gold? or like neon red) would really take it to the next level.

Taking oneself too seriously? Or a pair of authors building on top of a rich history of economic and social theory to make sense of an immense technology tree that affects millions?

It is all in how you look at it.

Criticizing is easy; we all do it sometimes.

I do it too -- I'll take a negative interpretation and make uncharitable assumptions. Then it snowballs and out pops a not very nice thought which might end up as a HN comment.

It seems that something grabbed you about the content. Perhaps if you look again and investigate the lens of the author you will find more to appreciate in it?

I wonder if you would be willing to examine your claim that "it is all obvious to those who do it". Is it really? All parts of how things fit together are obvious? Am I misunderstanding you?

The author wrote that book, which I found quite interesting: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300209570/atlas-ai

In particular, in this book there is a discussion about the dangers and epistemic distortions induced by the "supervised learning" paradigm in machine learning, which imposes rigid systems of classification on reality, which was a novel and refreshing angle for me.

The graphic is wonderful -- wide ranging and mind expanding. Think of it as a jumping off point in connecting sociotechnical systems around "AI".

Also, for context around the project as a whole, you need to read the accompanying narrative (scroll down).

Really enjoyed poking around the graphic and diving into all the interlocking systems. Really didn't enjoy the prose below it as much. Rather than adding to it, it seemed to drown out other ways of consuming the information.

I think I learned a lesson about how a heavy-handed POV can push the audience right past the ideal zone of understanding. Or maybe I didn't learn that lesson, and I will continue to write primarily to show off how insightful my insights are.

From the text:

> Our exploded view diagram combines and visualizes three central, extractive processes that are required to run a large-scale artificial intelligence system: material resources, human labor, and data.

Also:

> Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielson use the term ‘extractivism’ to name the relationship between different forms of extractive operations in contemporary capitalism, which we see repeated in the context of the AI industry. 10 There are deep interconnections between the literal hollowing out of the materials of the earth and biosphere, and the data capture and monetization of human practices of communication and sociality in AI.

What are the arguments both -for- and -against- a claim that "data" is an extractive process as used here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com