The misdirect: what is driving our technological revolutions is not technology, but something else ..
Should we pause all AI experiments (1) or recognize that the most important conversations are not about the technology, but something else?
The future of life institute published a letter asking to Pause the giant AI experiments for the next 6 months (1). Seeing who some of the signatories are it worries me that their intentions, conciously or subconciously is to misdirect the conversation.
We know this because the AI-game changer is not our first technological revolution (2), we’ve been here before .. so many times (3).
My key point is: its not about technology it’s about business.
According to Shoshana Zuboff there are especially two forces at play every time the world tumbles into creative destruction (4) moving from one capitalist model to another (5).
- Consumer demands change faster than the current enterprises and organizations (6) (incumbents are slipping and they can’t keep up .. so they want to slow down the process).
- Technology is used as a scape goat, the real driver of uncontrolled technological development is uncontrolled business processes and models (7)
Reading the letter from The Future of Life Institute there are a lot of control wanted to be exerted on the technology, while my reading found nothing about the business models and practices benefitting from it.
Regarding controlling technology, we have to remember that some of the craziest people we have encountered have been obsessed with trying to stop technological development (8).
And its a misdirect because it keeps our eyes away from what is really driving and enabling the direction of change: what is driving every technological revolution is not technology idealism, but capitalism through business models and processes (7).
If you want to reign in or pause something its unhealthy or destructive business practices and models that leads to the changes we want or don’t want. Technology on it’s own is neither good nor bad, it’s a force like most evolutionary living systems which keeps developing, but has no concious intention (9) (and given that one of the Signatories of the letter is Elon Musk I find it hard to believe that controlling business processes is what he wants).
Sources:
- https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
- https://medium.com/everything-new-is-dangerous/what-can-we-learn-from-previous-transformations-becab3de10f8
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_Financial_Capital
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
- https://www.180360720.no/?p=5112
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/creating-value-in-the-age-of-distributed-capitalism
- https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/digital-economy-the-human-factor-13050472.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber_Manifesto
- https://santiagos.space/the-library/what-technology-wants-summary/
