I appreciate that in both this and Enshittification, he lays out clear (though not easy) things that ordinary people can do to stand up to the rich who are trying to control everything. His books somehow manage to be both infuriating and encouraging simultaneously.
Points to remember:
- AI is cool, but it isn’t either the second coming of the messiah or the next big evil thing.
- Either of those messaging points play into the hands of the tech CEOs who are trying to convince investors not to jump ship by putting out the message that AI is sooooo powerful. (It is very cool tech that’s also very damaging to the environment.)
- They’re spending 1T and making 50B a year so they’re losing an outrageous amount of money this year. Most of the new AI things (e.g. Meta Muse) have nothing to do with convincing individuals to use them and everything to with convincing the big players in the stock market that they’re still growing companies (the shares are worth more that way)
- They can’t be trusted one bit with data privacy.
- Hugging face wasn’t actually rogue AI, it was just a regular program that submitted prompts to AI. The AI just did what it was told and the algorithm ran exactly as it was built by a human. It just had abysmal guardrails and no man-in-the-middle.
- Danielle Smith may say that the data centres IN Alberta will need to pay for their own oil and gas in three years but actually, what they’ll need to do in three years is complete replace all their CPUs (they go through them so fast that it’s usually either easy to gut and rebuild or totally raze and rebuild existing data centres, which is wild)
- Amazon workers desperately need a union. And Bezos needs to be taxed, and reminded the workers are just as much humans as he is.
- If we repealed some of bill C-11 from 2012 (update to the copyright act) we would be able to make our own repairs to devices, have a Canadian app store in the iphone and all sorts of cool things that like 7 silicon valley companies currently won’t let us do.
- Don’t let Open AI & Anthropic pull a SpaceX IPO or your retirement index funds will be in trouble (mine are already in trouble because I worked in the arts for 15 years!)
- If the Emiratis decide they need their investment money back, that alone would burst the AI bubble. Which isn’t impossible if they need to fund a conflict with Iran.
- Oh and they say they’re not losing billions and that their operating expenses are low, but that’s because operating expenses are listed as marketing. They’ve got all sorts of fun (illegal) accounting tricks going on.
- Breaches like Hugging Face make the case for them that “we (the good guys)” need this tech before “they (the bad guys aka the Chinese) ” get it. It’s very space race but with serious internet security consequences.
- Oh and, if we want tech sovereignty in Canada, what we really need is to get the government on an open source alternative to Microsoft 365 since Trump is now telling Microsoft to turn off their services to anyone foreign official who annoys him and the entire Canadian government runs on it.
