Box087: Oh, What’s the Use?

31.12.22

I’ve been out of hospital a few days now, largely immobile and struggling once again with the feeling of uselessness and helplessness. I’m trying to close out the ‘To Read’ list by the 3rd so that I can five in to writing the next PhD chapter ASAP as I’ve sort of set a deadline of mid-Jan for that. I also don’t want this post, which has been open fo two weeks following me into 2023 so I’m shoving it out the door now.

I worry there’s too much opining on this year’s AI explosions going on. Unfortunately my research puts me in the position of needing to engage with a lot of it and also be one of the voices in the echo chamber. Part of this is entirely self-reflexive as me working out my practice and my relationship with the subject. Unlike crypto, I do think AI has incredible potential: AI is doing good stuff quite well. There are now 18 medicines that were developed over the year using AI, it managed to do most of the legwork on solving protein folding and AI was used to successfully identify Covid variants. AI, in applied situations, does seem to live up to most of the hype or at least the hype has calmed down and the adults are taking over.

Noah Smith’s early Decembers letter made some very good, very rational arguments about AI and the near future. With roon, he points out that AI is profoundly unlikely to result in mass unemployment, something I fully agree with simply because at a purely simple level – what good to anyone is mass unemployment? Why would anyone want to just manage algorithms? Who would buy all the stuff? However, the whole argument is still framed through a productivity/efficiency mindset. As long as exploitative capitalism produces AI, it will reproduce exploitative capitalism. Smith and roon describe the idea that AI will probably become ‘autocomplete for everything’ which I think is just about right and something I would actually enjoy: autocompleted code, blogs, emails, texts, micro-tasks, meetings, note-taking, copying from one document to another and so on.

Smith and roon very briefly touch on the opportunity that: ‘The increased wealth that AI delivers to society should allow us to afford more leisure time for our creative hobbies.’ But this is the bit that’s missing. AI should result in more leisure time, a shorter working week, more diversity of activity and experience and joy in people’s lives. How will all this productivity lead to that? Given everything we know and have experienced why wouldn’t AI just result in even greater profit being fed to tech leaders as they massively increase wealth inequality? Why would the next big AI tech companies not just operate like Amazon and use every new innovation to squeeze their workers and customers even harder for Bezos’ space boner?

These people want to automate creativity, the bastion of anti-capitalist work; slow, caring, experiential, personal, emotional. That should tell you everything you need to know about what the world of AI work will look like.

The problem of criticality is another dimension. If we are to go about auto-generating content, be it code, art or text then do we risk losing critical capacity? I would say that critical practice is about being able to and actively thinking about building or making things to understand how other people think about building and making things so that we can better understand why we have the things we have built and made and how they instantiate certain ways of thinking. (Why car-centric cities, why a drive towards productivity-driven automation, why the sexualisation of automated assistants, why a language of the occult to describe computation, why obfuscate labour in automation?) If you’re putting all that making on a machine then can you still think critically at the same level about what you’re doing and why?

No probably not, but maybe you don’t need to. In the mid-2000s, Apple were making Macs cool and I was at art school and everyone wanted one and they shipped with Garage Band. The music was amazing. You could start a band on a whim and produce a demo track super quick. I wrote so many drum lines with no experience of drumming at all or any theoretical understanding of music (it was all punk bands to be fair). The feeling of the music coming out then (now coyly termed ‘indie sleaze’) was magical – anyone and everyone could do it without a stuffy sound engineer giving you a hard time about compression. There are real parallels to the narrative around generative AI now and how it is broadening access to creativity. Garage Band didn’t kill drummers or rich, critical and experimental music and I doubt AI will kill critical practice either. For those that find that important, we’ll keep doing it.

AI could, speculatively, liberate people from work, rebalance wealth, move us away from materially and labour extractive capitalism and towards community-oriented life, giving us time to create, explore, care and flourish. But the very fact that the big breakthrough this year has been about automating creativity (something people actually enjoy doing, but managers and tech people find an annoying expense to be treated with disdain) shows that it is most likely going to reinforce and deepen existing capitalism. AI is no more ‘democratising art’ than Garage Band ‘democratised’ music. Apple and MySpace made all the money from that wave as Microsoft, Open AI and Stability AI and their VC’s will make all the money from generative AI.

Metwhatnow

I had a bunch of stuff about the decline and fall of the metaverse written before going to hospital but I realise now that it was quite gleeful and bitter so I’ve just made a list of stuff:

Cory Doctorow on Facebook (‘Meta’s’) pivot-to-video and the fradulent boosterism of Facebook’s (sorry ,’Meta’s’) aggressive acquisitions towards a failed metaverse: The EU held a metaverse launch party where 6 people showed up – Decentreland has 38 active users but claims it has 6000 for its $1bn valuation. Facebook’s (sorry, ‘Meta’s’) gamble has famously, not paid off either – even their own employees don’t like it. This is probably why Apple is keeping a pretty low-key metaverse presence – they’re not stupid and they actually know how to make grotesque amount of money. Are failures in research infrastructure to blame for web3 and the metaverse? Yes probably.

For 2023

Just some notes of things I had to take into next year:

Take things at face value. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck etc. The current vibe has a lot of people casting about to get a feel for what’s coming next and just as many people willing to hoik their nonsense to turn a quick buck. A lot of things that appear stupid and nonsensical are in fact stupid and nonsensical, as this year’s crypto and metaverse crash have shown.
Saw Hamilton twice this year. Great every time.
I’m going to have to experiment with image generators / diffusion models. It can’t be avoided anymore so I just need to think about a way to do it that makes it a worthwhile endeavour.
There are about twenty things that happened in my life that just constantly recur – snippets of conversation, a thing someone said in passing, an experience, an interaction. They’re apparently random, no more meaningful than anything else, but I remember them all the time and they have an outsize role in how I think about myself and my life.
The only aim of the wealthy is to make more money and avoid paying tax. Any time any tech company issues any big proclamation about the future or democracy, climate or experience or whatever, just know that at the core of the implication wheel is that ambition.
I discovered that a part of my brain has been sitting idle just holding on to all the lyrics for Million Dead’s I Am The Party, which I was able to sing verbatim, having not even listened to it for maybe ten, fifteen years. What else have I got in storage just taking up space?
Paying more tax and engaging meaningfully with politics would fix most of the problems they want to innovate in and profit from; climate, public transport, education, equality etc.
Would this innovation be better as you paying tax and supporting access to voting?
It really is the sunset of social networks. Goodbye and thanks for all the whatevers. That could mean a lot of introspection but I doubt it.

Short stuff

Sorry these are really badly structured and credited because I was copying stuff on my phone from a hospital bed and it’s hard to do that in a good way come on AI sort it out.

Timnit Gebru, similar to above, on the role of Effective Altruism in AI safety.
Linked this above but a deeper dive on the nihilistic disdain AI people have for human creativity.
Playbook for integrating climate change into your stories from Good Energy.
The harm from worrying about climate change from the BBC and very much that hope is the answer (when well tempered with real dread.)
Shumon Basar ruminating on Endcore.

Ok, love you, you know that. Sometimes it’s hard to because I get so wrapped up in my own fears and worries and get quite selfish and self-important. I’m not very good at thinking about other people outside of transactional circumstances which is why I’m terrible at retaining friendships and I don’t know if I can fix that now. But I do love you and sometimes I suddenly feel it and remember and it sort of makes everything else quite pale.

Box064: The Consumerists are Persistent

21.02.2221.02.22

DS064: Four rocks, closely arranged with flower-like arrangements of black oil gravitating towards them.

No posts the last two weeks. I won’t make excuses. I’m in the last few weeks of my break from work and I want to spend it with my head buried in the sand hiding from the nightmare that people are willingly building, shipping and advertising. So this is a bit longer because it’s two weeks of emails to myself and unread tabs but also has no coherent narrative.

DS064

My very first, long-delayed foray into geometry nodes. Usually when a new feature is packed in to Blender or I find a new plugin I’ll find an excuse to play with it in a render. However, geometry nodes isn’t just a new feature, it’s an entirely new underlying logic and system for making things with dozens, if not hundreds of new features and an entire new language of nodes and procedures to learn. I’ve been putting it off because it would either require dutifully following along some tutorials or finding an excuse to dive right in. This week I finally found something (representing magnetic fields sort of) where I could start to dive in and play with it, fumbling along as I go.

I really prefer to learn this way – through trial and error by solving a concrete problem rather than abstractly exploring wildly or being introduced. There’s always a way to achieve anything, even if it takes a lot of force, so it’s always worth persevering. I knew exactly the effect I wanted to achieve so it was just a case of going towards it.

What if ethics aren’t immutable?

I’m paraphrasing massively but I remember someone giving a lecture, possibly George, and saying that; ‘Everyone has ethics. Elon Musk has ethics, it’s just that we might not agree with them.’ The point being that possession of ethics does not make an immutable goodness or badness, it’s just a state of being.

I’ve been background-wathcing Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D while on the turbo trainer. These types of shows are perfect for training: Two episodes neatly fit in a 90 minute session, you never feel like you’re missing anything or need to really think and they have a predictable beat. I’m in the fourth season now and I’ve just struck a curious seam of narrative in which protagonists are being replaced by perfect android replicas to fulfil this season’s villain’s plot of something or other blah blah blah. The plot itself isn’t particularly interesting, what’s interesting is the ethical stance and lack thereof of the villain and protagonists.

The process works likes this: The villain kidnaps the person they want to replicate and then ‘uploads’ their memories, experiences, thoughts and feelings into an android replica who is then sent back to replace the real person. It’s revealed early on that these androids, full of the experiences and memories of their ‘true’ selves, fully believe themselves to be the original person; they don’t know that they’re ‘fake.’ They experience, fear, hope and desire and, when finding out they’re androids; existential horror.

For the villain it is crucial that the original people are kept alive and in stasis and he actually goes to great pains of building a simulation in which they can be happy while kidnapped. He is adamant that he is not a monster and doesn’t want to kill or cause pain in the pursuit of his goals. He doesn’t need to do this, in other aspects he demonstrates a psychopathic commitment to his goals and disregard for life where you might expect him to think of the people he’s kidnapping as disposable; but he doesn’t. He is adamant that he is not a monster and won’t cross the line of killing or even causing pain.

On the other hand, the good guys have absolutely no qualms about killing and burning androids they find amongst their ranks. There’s not even a debate. In one episode, it’s just a smash cut from ‘you’re an android’ to a literal furnace with the android in, even though, through lengthy exposition they’ve described how the androids have the full experience of being human and believe they are the people they are replicating.

It’s just an interesting piece of writing that the villain, despite having no real narrative need, goes to great lengths to protect and ensure the wellbeing of his captives for purely ethical reasons while the ‘good guys’ just completely eschew any ethical debate about the life or not-lifeness of the people/machines they are mercilessly executing. Maybe I’m speaking too soon and a plot will emerge in which these ethical decisions have meaning but at the moment it seems the writers have just taken the decision to avoid any AI ethics debates by having the protagonists behave monstrously.

In a series that traces some of the underlying quandaries of the Marvel universe and (in simplistic terms) the politics of superheroes, power and identity it feels complacent but I guess it also made me think about the ethical debates that aren’t happening in the real world. The protagonists do not consider the execution of the androids worthy of debate or even worthy of consideration of consideration of debate. Are there things like that that we’re just completely missing in a sort of ethical blindspot?

We underestimated the persistence of consumerists.

Someone on Twitter told me to do my own research when I asked them for good examples of positive impacts of NFTs. So I did actually do a bit but it’s still all things that will happen either once something is launched or at a later stage. They’re going to revolutionise x or disrupt y so get in now on launch day for a low fee. Maybe I’ll have egg on my face and all there’ll be some great liberation. For now, as with AI, self-driving cars etc, the promises are able to be promises because they can be offset forever because unlike Fyre Festival, you haven’t actually promised a date where you have to deliver.

I did hear (I can’t remember where) that the point isn’t to accelerate ownership, but that NFTs for artists/musicians is an actual end to ownership: In theory (isn’t it always?) everyone will be able to access the image, the song or digital asset for free and the artist is fine with that as one person gets to ‘own’ it (not literally obviously) but in doing so enables everyone else to use it. So, if some wealthy collector wants to pay £££ for an NFT of a song which pays for the production and distribution of that song and income for the musician the result is everyone else gets it for free. I mean put like that, I’m all for it even if it just basically a culture 1.0 patronage model straight out of the renaissance.

The remaining problem is the assumption that investors have good taste in mind. In this theory, I’d have acces to amazing music from a diverse range of artists who haven’t been served by labels or streaming services. However, the track record is terrible. It’s undeniable that the market is completely flooded with really bad art and scams. And maybe. Maybe. Maybe the earnest pro-sayers are right, and this is just ‘teething issues.’ However, short of evidence (which again, I’d love to see but just keep being told to find myself) it still looks like the worst excesses of Web 2 accelerated:

This one to me feels like the fag-end of the boosterism of the last ten to fifteen years… it’s an attempt to say ‘we’re just going to scale this up to a point it’s as scaled up as it can be, we’re not shifting to a new mode of how we understand technology might impact on our lives.’ It is still just smartphones, virtual reality, machine learning joined together and then captured by two or three corporations…’ / ‘…unfortunately human beings are susceptible to this kind of nonsense.’
David Runciman and John Naughton on ‘the metaverse’, The Next Big Thing

Runciman and Naughton’s point in their discussion on Talking Politics is that Web 3.0, the metaverse and crypto are all symptoms of a chronic lack of imagination in the western world about what the Internet could be:

‘…the use of the technology isn’t innovative. It’s basically just doing tricks with old technology, like the web… There’s an opportunity cost for that. It’s sucking all that talent into big tech companies when the talent should be working on real underlying technology… It’s a radical change from what happens now. We’re not bothered that every smart PhD in computer science wants to work for Facebook… The critical bit of the geopolitical rivalry around tech now is: Which states will have the next generation of the underlying technology in the way that the Internet is our underlying technology, what’s the next one? And it isn’t smart startups doing tricks on the web, whether 2 or 3. It isn’t the continued hyper-gamification of the world.’
David Runciman and John Naughton on ‘the metaverse’, The Next Big Thing

I just thought I’d quote big chunks of this conversation since it was at once astute and depressing. Naughton ends his point with saying that; at every turn ‘we underestimate the persistance of consumerists.’

There is a version of the web which is better. Wordle, (which I don’t play) is like that. It doesn’t advertise, push or occupy attention. It just makes use of a mechanic to bring a little joy each day. But there’s no big bucks to be made and – ultimately – the consumerists are persistent.

Recent

I spoke to MFA Transdisciplinary Design students at Parsons the other week. Radha and Elliot were kind enough to invite me to talk about imagination. I have to be honest; it wasn’t one of my best. I was a bit rushed and rambly but I’ve uploaded the slides for you here.

I also joined Rob, Radha, Erica and Valdis for an episode of From Later to talk about that story about Canon removing chips from cartridges and how it was perhaps a turning point of some significance.

Upcoming

Natalie and I have been invited by the wonderful Kara Chin to give a talk as part of her show at Humber Street Gallery. We’ll be talking about what is simulation and what we choose to simulate and are working on some interesting technical gimmicks to make it a bit more fun. It’s online and free so grab a ticket here.

Short Stuff

An Open AI engineer decided to throw some hype fuel on the bonfire by claiming that some networks may already be conscious. Folks were quick to point out that this was just hype and an annoying thing to say. This is a shame in a year in which measured, calm and thoughtful advances in AI seemed to be on the cards. Well, we got to February.
Interesting thread on the most crucial design methods to know which features a pleasing absence of speculative design in contrast to the uproarious claims of LinkedIn. (I have started a bookmarks folder of medium posts and blogs of UX, marketing and design companies laying claim to ‘speculative design.’ It’s called ‘I’m spartacus’ at the moment.)
Matt wrote a little about rules, boardgames and Excel which reminded me of Conway’s Law: That any system built by an organisation will mirror the communication structure of the organisation. I wonder if the same applies to games, that games will mirror the sort of internal structure of their designers?
NVIDIA didn’t buy Arm in the end. Basically too many regulatory hurdles. There’s not too much more to say but when they put together the origin story for World War 3: The Chip Wars, it might be an interesting little sidebar.
Facebook can’t sell its botched cryptocurrency, Libra. Nor can it do anything with it.
Check out Hugo Pilate and Makan Fofana’s virtual banlieue project. They’ve developed a pretty rigorous methodology to prototype democratic virtual worlds.

Thanks Oleg for pointing out an errant 4% padding bit of CSS which was giving this janky website a horrid horizontal scroll. All fixed now. It is held together with glue and spit though. I still love you.