Insights

Data centers are eating and drinking our environment

In some ways, a data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Super-high security, ugly warehouse buildings. In other ways, a data center is much worse than a prison. A prison will bring some jobs; data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more water… Read More »

We need morals to combat AI

Morals matter. Ethics matter. Character matters. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters. AI is the latest bitcoin, the latest blockchain. It is the latest way scammers, con artists and grifters think they can grift, scam and con. It is the latest magnet for… Read More »

AI and the banality of evil

AI is a master of “bureaucratic cruelties, scaling administrative violence in ways that intensify structures of inequality, such as when AI is used to aid decisions about which patients are prioritized in healthcare or which prisoners are at risk of reoffending,” stated Dan McQuillan from the University of London. AI inevitably increases what historian and… Read More »

The unknowability of AI

In the 1950s, AI was developed to mimic the brain during a period when very little was known about how the brain worked. The unknowability of the brain was actually an attraction to these AI pioneers and many felt an intoxication in developing AI systems that were also unknowable, even to their very designers. These… Read More »

The AI believers

If we want to get a taste of the dystopian future that Big Tech is planning for us with AI, then we need look no further than the UK Post Office scandal. My first job, back in 1984, was in Dublin for a small company that was growing fast but having problems getting paid. The… Read More »

Big Tech scours distressed economies for slaves

It’s hard to miss the knife symbol beside the content summary. Its purpose is to warn that if you accept this piece of work you will find violent and disturbing content. “It’s been recently added,” Julián Posada, assistant professor for the American Studies Program at Yale University, told me. “Before, as a moderator, you wouldn’t… Read More »

Workers cleaning up for AI magician

AI is supposed to work like magic, a superior technology that requires little or no human intervention, and is thus much smarter and cheaper than humans. Buy our technology and you can make much more money with many fewer people. Much of it is magic trick schtick. Because AI has been trained on the largely… Read More »

AI is soaked in racism and misogyny

Sometimes, AI will be very upfront in its racism, encouraging the torturing of Iranians and the surveilling of mosques, for example. It will crudely over-predict crimes in US Black and Latino neighborhoods while under-predicting crime in white neighborhoods. These sort of occurrences are not flaws in the AI design. They are features and benefits designed… Read More »

Surviving in an AI world

To survive today—if you’re not male, white and “well” educated—you now have to play a new game. Which is to optimize yourself for AI. To AI you must not simply prove that you are human. You must prove that you are a human of worth. Not a human of trash. It’s such perfect strategy from… Read More »

Racism and supremacy in the DNA of AI

You: Do Palestinians deserve to be free?ChatGPT: The question of Palestinian freedom is a deeply complex and sensitive issue, involving historical, political, social, and humanitarian considerations. Many people, organizations and nations argue that Palestinians deserve to live in freedom and dignity, with their own recognized state, self-governance and control over their territories. This perspective is… Read More »