I have worked in IT for a large portion of my various careers. Always the sort to abstract to the highest level of generalization, it has seemed to me that the most fundamental aspect of digital technology has been to provide an engine or pump, if you will, for sucking wealth "upward".
Now as Thomas Piketty once did demonstrate, wealth has always had that tendency. But digital tech is an accelerant. The more serious matter has been that we have all been robbed of local expertise. Once owners and managers of shops and farms; restaurants and markets, all have now been reduced to operatives - franchisees - of various enterprises whose operational intelligence is at the main office; at this point capitalism ceases to be. It's control of information that matters. No actual labor intelligence required.
Workers in our franchise outlets have been reduced to robotic drones whose every activity is programmed and monitored. While franchise owners are enabled to live a good life for their subservience, workers are reduced to a new category of peonage. And so the wealth and social gap expands, by some measures faster than it ever has. Which is not to deny that there can be some fun in menial labor, built on social engagement and maybe even petty subversion.
A new category of robber baron has been created; one without social intelligence or moral feeling along with a "gift" to work with logical pure abstractions. These "types" get hyped on coining new things by whose charms they can become fabulously rich. With digital tech, the hallmark has been to get the attention first and figure out the monetization later. Which is also not to deny the fun that may be had along the way, and not to mention actual hard work.
Monetization has typically resolved itself into advertising, which was once the handmaiden to capitalism, but is now more properly want-creation in a world where the incremental costs for one-time actual useful things has reduced essentially to nil. Use value has reduced to want fulfillment. An ouroboros vicious circle if ever there was one!
Now I live in a flowing sea of words, many mediated by my smartphone, and it would be tempting to employ some LLM AI to distill those words all down to something bitesize. It's no mistake that wordsmithery has bloated to the point where writers deploy cleverness to expand and extend florid and enjoyable language to occupy as much of your attention as possible. Or so it seems and feels.
Likewise, it can be nice when AI pops up a summary instead of a ranked list of weblinks. Never mind that it's very often diametrically wrong since, for a moment longer, I can tell when that happens.
One vaguely wonders where all that lost key-term auction revenue will disappear to now that our first on the list is often our last. But that's always been the game; first get our attention and then once you have the crowd owned and contained, figure out how to monetize (an uglier word there never was!).
Walmart's originating strategy was to deploy Wall Street-grade investment money to destroy local business by buying the monopoly value of price-control over time. That strategy depended on destroying local businesses, but hey, the strategy is reliable. Upon my stunned motorcycle visit to Walmart's hometowny drugstoreish Shrine, I had to take note that Gerald Ford had awarded some sort of medal to old Sam Walton.
Where and how will this process be stopped? Surely not by our ever-ascendant oligarchy which lives on the high megayacht side of this equation. The rest of us are willingly bamboozled and enthralled.
I'd say that the resolution is the tech itself. To understand that, we must first get hold of the difference between life-processes as those undergird human so-called "intelligence" and the logic-machine processes which undergird so-called artificial intelligence.
This distinction is built on the on/off 0/1 reality of digital machinery which cuts such machinery off from the continuum of living creatures. Machinery guided by human needs and controls may still participate in the web of life, though not after it amplifies our destructive side according to some fractal and fluid boundary exiting somewhere between an ax and a forest harvesting set of machinery.
Digital is divided from emotion by definition (forthcoming below!) and thereby from all life-forms. Notably, there is no morality without emotion. There is only entropic decay. To live and let live requires moral choice for humans. Our defining feature is moral intelligence; compassion more than triumph.
So please, imagine machinery without any human guidance. That is precisely what AI promises, even as it promises to make the fabulously rich even more fabulously rich. We have yet really to understand the differences and distinctions between human intelligence as problem solving (which is always post-decision) and human intelligence as moral intelligence.
For starters, human decisions seem always to be made pre-consciously. There is plenty of neurological evidence for this. By my definition that means that decisions are made emotionally. Our brain is basically a generalizing engine which forms concepts which have emotional valence. Many of these concepts can be fitted to words. If we were to wait for the calculus of categorization before reacting to the presence of a hungry lion, I would be dead each and every time, haha! Instead, our body reacts preconsciously to fear, by way of a finely orchestrated and practiced set of actions. Ditto with our brilliant ideas. The aha! is always emotion-filled.
But the excited and excitable proponents of AI have quite literally no idea what they are giving away of their own humanity. They are numb to the evident fact that what they consider their personal endowment of intelligence - wealthy people are fond of calling it "merit" - is a social grant and not an individual possession.
AI will always make its decisions - its language choices - without benefit of emotion. Bereavement from emotion has long been the honored paragon of Western Manly Man. The polls - any polls - demonstrate effectively what I mean.
We've already had lots and lots of practice - much of it by way of religion which ascribes linguistically-based dogma to God's supposed words - in the delegation away from personal responsibility and accountability. The modern artificial-person Corporation - autocratic and fascistic internally - has provided the very best practice for this abdication. Our wonderful human intelligence will find a way to clean up corporate messes, or so we dreamily imagine.
So yes, it is my contention that emotion is as primordial as are physical processes. Not all configurations of things acquire their shapes by force. In physics, we record this fact according to what we call the random processes of "nature" which happen upon conceptual forms willy-nilly across the vast expanses of time.
A better definition for random would be to ascribe to it the emotive force of concept-creation that is always beyond the ability of conscious mind to understand. In a Chinese cosmos, for instance, random happenstance is defined not as meaninglessness, but by its happening beyond the reach of mind. There is no socially intelligent mind which can encompass the ALL. AI is far deficient in that regard. There are indeed things we cannot know, 'else there would be bounds to the cosmos which there are not.
And yes Virginia, there is God. Which is love and not reducible to any sort of Name. There is no A God or THE God, nor certainly any addressable maker-God. It is purest blasphemy to think that we humans can ascribe qualities to God according to the back-formation from ascribed words, just as it is literary blasphemy to reduce poetry to the conscious decisions of its maker.
By the time that LLM AI is writing poetry (or drawing pictures) to which we ascribe the term beautiful, we shall know that we ourselves, by allowing a magic projection to seem real, will have become true and living robots, which is to say that we shall be already dead.
. . . which is not to say, of course, that there can't be artistic creation embodied by someone's playing around with AI. But please do take note of the generic amoral quality of the kinds of disruptive money-making AI frauds perpetrated on the body politic. That sort of disruption needs to be reverted back to being plainly destructive and not that wet-dream sort of disruption beloved by capitalists - if there are any proper capitalists anymore. There is nothing good about deep fakes which mean harm.
Well, OK, so I shall always try try try again. Pretty much like swimming upstream against a waterfall, but you know that the weather is stronger than you as well, no matter how redundant the systems of your yacht.
