The real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders

The studios fought like hell for the right to fire their writers and replace them with chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that the chatbots could do the writers’ jobs.

Think of the bosses who fired their human switchboard operators and replaced them with automated systems that didn’t solve callers’ problems, but rather, merely satisficed them: rather than satisfying callers, they merely suffice.

Studio bosses didn’t think that AI scriptwriters would produce the next Citizen Kane. Instead, they were betting that once an AI could produce a screenplay that wasn’t completely unwatchable, the financial markets would put pressure on every studio to switch to a slurry of satisficing crap, and that we, the obedient “consumers,” would shrug and accept it.

Despite their mustache-twirling and patrician chiding, the real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders.

-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

People who think that replacing a wild ecosystem (left pic) with a solar plant (right pic) is "good for the environment" are seriously delusional. Solar panels require a global supply chain, (fossil fuel-based) mining and refining of rare-earth minerals, denuding of areas, and regular washing, all of which are extremely ecologically destructive. They also have a relatively short life and become problematic toxic waste afterwards. Humans have existed sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the advent of civilization and thrived - believe it or not - without any of these 'green' energy technologies. If we wish to survive and thrive again we must return to those ways.

found 'the way' a really interesting piece of speculative fiction exploring the idea of anti-migrant xenophobic violence being turned inwards towards 'legitimate citizens' when interests of capital are threatened by struggle, but this sequence in the last episode def stood out to me as a neoluddite.

feels connected to this quote from dan mcquillan's 'resisting ai - an anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence':

Bergson argued that if one accepts a ready- made problem in this way, "one might just as well say that all truth is already virtually known, that its model is patented in the administrative offices of the state, and that philosophy is a jig- saw puzzle where the problem is to construct with the pieces society gives us the design it is unwilling to show us." (Deleuze, 2002, cited in Coleman, 2008) In other words, however sophisticated or creative AI might seem to be, its modelling is stuck in abstractions drawn from the past, and so becomes a rearrangement of the way things have been rather than a reimagining of the way things could be. AI has, in effect, an inbuilt political commitment to the status quo, in particular to existing structures that embed specific relations of power. The absence of different concepts leaves out the possibility of conceiving that things could be arranged differently.

We need a return of the anti war movement, of the luddites, of pro union sentiment, maybe we are seeing that right now I just hope we don't let it die out this time, we don't let society remain complacent

Mushrooms turn dead wood into food and medicine which is better than anything any tech start up has ever done

"Instead of imagining a world without work that will never come to pass, we should examine the ways historical struggles posited an alternative relationship to work and liberation, where control over the labor process leads to greater control over other social processes, and where the ends of work are human enrichment rather than abstract productivity. furthermore, these struggles point toward the only vehicle for a liberation from capitalism: the composition of a militant struggling class that attacks capital in all its manifold domination, including the technological".

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller

‘‘Of course, my paintings are political. All art is political one way or another. The greatest challenge for myself is to not make propaganda art. Art that defines one way of looking at something or one idea that is easily interpreted is not always interesting art. While this kind of art might be agreeable it is also dangerous art. When art has become a marketing tool I doubt that it can any longer be a critic.’’ - Greg Lukens

© Grunge Included | @37fotosb

champions from beyond the rift, heed my call

Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? [...] ''Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus''. If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. […] It remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine. [...] The craze for Gothic fiction after ''The Castle of Otranto'' was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. […] What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. […] As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible - remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however ''irrational,'' to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. [...] To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings.

Thomas Pynchon, Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

Real art takes time and effort to be made. You shouldn't be able to just set up shop and have something life-looking within SECONDS. Art is the product of painstakingly taking your time to create a product by yourself without relying on technology to do your work for you. Now bear with me while I explain why photographic art is not real a-

AI ethics vs AI "safety"

They are hemorrhaging a river of cash, but that river’s source is an ocean-sized reservoir of even more cash.

To keep that reservoir full, the AI industry needs to convince fresh rounds of “investors” to give them hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of a multi-trillion-dollar payoff.

That’s where the “AI Safety” story comes in. You know, the tech bros who run around with flashlights under their chins, intoning “ayyyyyy eyeeeee,” and warning us that their plausible sentence generators are only days away from becoming conscious and converting us all into paperclips.

It’s pure criti-hype: “Our technology is so powerful that it endangers the human race, which is why you should both invest in it and use it to replace all of your workers.”

This form of criticism is entirely distinct from the legitimate realm of “AI ethics,” whose emphasis is on how bad AI is at the things that will supposedly generate those promised trillions. Things like bias, low-quality training data, training data attacks, data ordering attacks, adversarial examples, the endless stream of confident lies, and the high degree of supervision they necessitate.

Add to that the exploitative labor pipeline, the environmental damage, and the public safety risks and a very different critique emerges —one that’s grounded in AI’s shortcomings, not the supposed risks arising from its incredible power.

-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Today we lost Ted Kaczynski. It's not surprising, we all knew that day was around the corner, considering his diagnosis, but hearing about it still shook me a bit. He was certainly not a flawless person, but his uncompromising devotion to defending the wild against the system of civilisation will forever earn him my respect. We need more people of such powerful character, determination and wit. Rest in power, Uncle Ted 💚

“Technology is far too important to be thought of as just a grab-bag of neat gadgets, and it’s far too powerful to be left in the hands of billionaire executives and venture capitalists,” [Jathan Sadowski] says. “Luddites want technology – the future – to work for all of us.”

[...]

“The historical luddites tried to make the system scream,” says Ongweso. “That catalysed later change. It’s part of the new luddite project to try to figure out how to do the same.”

Tom Humberstone: I’m a Luddite (And So Can You!) & Other Tales from The Nib (2023)

“The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!”

Rober E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian