Morlock Elloi on Mon, 4 Jul 2016 05:23:57 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Maciej Ceglowski: "Machine learning is like money laundering


There is a heavy bias here under the assumption that "we" exists and has common interests. This is not true.

There is a straightforward class division here.

This (the last 20-30 years) is the first time in the history that hi-IQ people with abstract thinking skills compose the *dominant* fraction of the workforce maintaining the power apparatus, due to automation and activities related to it. Clever people were always needed to maintain the power, but they used to be a tiny fraction of the total power-sustaining workforce, while the majority were blue-collar/thugs-with-guns labor kind. This has changed, and the said new workforce has all prerequisites - numbers, common economic interests, marriages, shared education and media - for morphing from a guild into the class. It's not 1%, but more like 4-5% (the slogan needs to change to "We are the 95%".)

As any class, they take care of their own interests - homeless/poor are not in that set. They are doing quite well, and the 'problems' discussed in the text are not their problems, so it's pointless to expect them to 'solve' those. If you think that fascism operated by thugs with few advisors was bad, wait to see how it feels when it's operated by the whole class.


The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically
accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it. Just
like we don't let countries build reactors that produce plutonium, no
matter how sincere their promises not to misuse it, we should not allow
people to create and indefinitely store databases of personal
information. The risks are too high.

I think a workable compromise will be to allow all kinds of
surveillance, but limit what anyone is allowed to store or sell.

More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something
unprecedented in human history. Not every year is Year Zero. This is not
the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the
rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a
rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought
those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

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