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Comment by sverona | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed his book, and I don't know, man. His thesis as I understand it is a viewpoint I have held for a while now --- artificial intelligence does things that humans do, but faster. It's a force multiplier. Hence your views on AI are likely to correspond directly to your views on those groups who hold power. McQuillan approaches this from an intersectional lens and arrives at entirely predictable conclusions. It's a bunch of academic jargon obscuring the central idea of "society consists mostly of people hurting people in easily identifiable ways, this is bad, AI makes it go faster, hence the ways we use AI are unethical." Or to make it even shorter, "No ethical AI under capitalism."

Admitting that more technology isn't going to solve our problems feels to me like admitting that we are well and truly fucked beyond saving.

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His article is perfectly reasonable, straightforward, and logical. It’s also more or less devoid of academic jargon. He makes clear points that are easy to relate to. Can’t speak to his book.

Why do you think admitting that technological solutionism isn’t going to save us means we’re fucked? Are you that cynical/have that little faith in humanity? There are clearly alternative modes of structuring society that we can try out if there’s the will to do so. If you don’t think so that’s your problem and is basically down to a failure in your imagination.

> more or less devoid of academic jargon

Really? What the heck does this mean:

> Contemporary AI, as I argue in my book, is an assemblage for automatising administrative violence and amplifying austerity. ChatGPT is a part of a reality distortion field that obscures the underlying extractivism

Administrative violence? Reality distortion field? Extractivism?

What is it with the trend to end so many words with “-ism” these days? Am i just supposed to understand any word that ends in -ism as some new hipster lingo? Whatthefuckism!

> And what is it with the trend to end so many words with “-ism” these days?

According to wikipedia[0], "isms" have been derided since the mid-19th century at least.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ism

They may have existed for 500 years; I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that in the last maybe 2-3 years their use has increased tremendously. I don’t know why it annoys me so much. Maybe it seems lazy, like the writer can’t find a word that suits his need so he makes one up by bastardizing an existing noun. Maybe it’s being used as some kind of signal, like I’m part of the hipster intelligencia of the day.

> Administrative violence? Reality distortion field? Extractivism?

Note that the first term has good results if you look it up (one being "what is administrative violence"), while the two others even have Wikipedia pages.

It’s okay to not be familiar with terms. No one knows everything. At the same time, maybe try modulating your response to be a little less reactive and childish. Just because you haven’t heard these terms before, doesn’t mean they aren’t easy to pick up and understand. We in programming like to define new terminology for new concepts we encounter to aid our exposition. The same is true for people in the social sciences. This article is targeted at people in the social sciences, and for an article written for that audience it is straightforward and well-written. So much so that I would say it should pose no trouble for someone unfamiliar with the terminology often used in that domain.

I suppose what I mean to say is I'm fucked.

Suffice to say I exist today because of other trans people on the Internet and a stack of medications. You may be right; I cannot imagine an "alternative means of structuring society" in which someone like me can exist for long.

Or that we'll just keep muddling along imperfectly as we always have, the same but different (and faster), as it's always been.

Amazing that we have had enough nukes to nearly wipe out humanity for over 50 years and our primary concern at the moment is a 4000 token limit LLM. Humans have always been terrible at risk assessment I suppose.

You skimmed the book, but didn't read it. I don't think you are the person whose review I'll take seriously.

To be clear, I more or less agree with him - it's just that I've heard it all before. Capitalism is bad, kyriarchy is bad, AI is dangerous, organize.

Also, his book is a dang academic monograph. The parts I skimmed over were mostly recapitulations of existing theory (I mean this in the political sense) that I am unfamiliar with.

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