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Technological Futures: A Letter to the Smolnet
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We're standing at a crossroads. Technological progression has led to a
retreat from physicality; whole classes of devices - cameras, music
players, notebooks - have been replaced by computers. Mass
computerization of most types of human activity and corporate control
of mainstream computer ecosystems has led to a drive toward constant
monetization and constant growth. Rapid upgrade cycles - often annual
or more - have resulted in a pervasive attitude of disposability,
generating enormous waste and resource consumption. These two stages -
"replace everything with computers" and "build computers in such a way
as to maximize recurring revenue" - have produced an alarming result:
functioning in a society nearly mandates ceding ground to
technocapitalism, and this trend is accelerating.
Large deep-learning models are increasingly being used for things
historically seen as the bastions of human ingenuity and creativity -
images, writing, music, code. Almost universally, these are
characterized by their use of human-generated training data scraped
from the Internet and their corporate ownership and operation. These
models are now being commercialized - such as by Microsoft with
Copilot, which costs a monthly fee. Worse, the major search engines
are moving from a "search and get a URL list" approach to a "ask our
conversational language model" approach, leaving those who actually
write things as little more than upstream suppliers to a bot.
Meanwhile, extruded text product and extruded imagery product - "AI
text" and "AI art" - make up a larger and larger portion of the
Internet.
We stand for an alternative vision - a humane, sustainable approach to
computing, independent of growth imperatives, the need for
monetization, and the concept of obsolescence.
Two Futures
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The Corporate Internet: Automation, Stagnation, Depletion
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We have been repeatedly assured that we are on the edge of a great and
glorious new era - one where automated systems and emerging
technologies allow human productivity to soar to new heights. The
utopian promise of an AI-assisted golden age is being promoted as a
possible future - if only we trust in a handful of large tech
companies (Alphabet and Microsoft/OpenAI prominent among them) to know
that is best for us.
So what, then, does the future look like? It looks like massive
changes to a large portion of knowledge-worker jobs. Some jobs will be
less affected, especially those in the trades, but these jobs will
mostly be in the category of "jobs too cheap to automate" - plumbing,
shipbreaking, retail, clothing manufacture, construction, waste
processing, some kinds of factory labor. The purpose of investment in
automation is to save money for the ownership class; this does not
line up with providing a comfortable living for everyone. With a
smaller number of available jobs, employer leverage over labor will
increase. Working hours will become longer - and for those who refuse
to work them, there will always be replacements available.
Productivity will be monitored by machines, and enforcement actions
will be automated and impersonal as well.
In the developing world, the same pattern will apply. Mass
exploitation of people and resources will continue and expand in the
interest of feeding the expanding consumer needs of the
developed-world upper class. Investment from the developed world will,
as ever, primarily occur under the rubric of "how can we increase
efficiency of production and extraction?" - not any genuine intent of
long-term improvements in quality of life. As is already happening,
the nastier and less visible parts of AI product development -
especially manual tagging of training data - will be dumped on
underpaid workers in developing countries. Increased capital capture
of governments in developing and developed countries will simplify
labor exploitation in both.
Mainstream entertainment will be increasingly machine-generated and
largely derivative. Creativity as a means of connection with another
human being will no longer be profitable or appreciated - instead,
machines will turn out infinite quantities of soulless material, often
customized to the viewer and advertised as "more immersive" and "more
customized." Communities and fandoms built around mutual enjoyment of
a thing will be badly harmed as a result, and artists, writers,
musicians, and programmers will find themselves in the unenviable
position of being made redundant by machines trained on their creative
labor. Authorship and copyright (and, by extension, copyleft) will be
conveniently laundered away for corporate and consumer use. The
Internet as an open platform will be marginalized or dead; over time
it will become little more than a collection of siloed services,
generally accessed through AI-based conversational interfaces owned
and trained by corporations.
Among the upper tiers of the employed population, mass automation will
allow for ever-increasing consumption of consumer goods. A parade of
new devices and services with pseudo-intelligent capabilities that
would have seemed miraculous in 2013 will be available, and updated
frequently. There will be demand for new and extravagant luxuries that
continues to fuel resource extraction and labor exploitation.
Ecological collapse will become steadily deeper, but its effects will
primarily not be visited upon the consumer class. Corporate
greenwashing, almost entirely focused on carbon-induced climate
change, will continue to ignore the other problems of overconsumption
- serious discussion of land and water overuse, deforestation,
mining-induced pollution, and similar issues will be studiously
avoided. Even absolute decoupling from carbon emissions will likely
remain a pipe dream.
In short, this is a future that will continue to reinforce the
privileges associated with wealth and power, and will undermine the
dignity of people.
We don't pretend that we can prevent that future. We're just
individuals, and not very many of them. What, then, can we do?
We can create an alternative.
Computing can be more than the ever-growing techno-capitalist
juggernaut. It can be about things other than speed, or scale. It can
be about human creation, and human interaction. It can be about people
finding new and creative uses for old hardware and software. It can be
about computing as an art, not as a production line. It can be about
sustainability. It can be about cleverness. It can be about small
things.
With that in mind, these are some conclusions we've reached.
* We reject the use of generative learning models outright. We
furthermore reject any AI development that is driven primarily by
corporate interests rather than the interests of the people affected
by it. Any AI development should be respectful of human creativity and
dignity.
* We commit to reducing our personal resource footprints, including
those of consumer goods. We commit to device lifetime extension and
the circular economy.
* We strive for repairability, maintainability, and long life for the
projects we create ourselves.
* We aim to collaborate with others in a spirit of conviviality before
reaching for corporate solutions, technologies, and devices. We look
with interest upon projects - including hardware, software, and
networks - that have people and their interactions at their center. We
also welcome and appreciate all forms of human creative expression.
* We embrace innovative, low-impact solutions to problems - ones
comprehensible and implementable by human beings working together.
* We repudiate racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. We work
toward a convivial technology future that is inclusive of people of
all backgrounds, identities, and experiences.
* We accept that we have participated, and participate, in an
exploitative and destructive system. We look to the future with a
sincere desire to do better.
We invite others to work toward a future that respects all people, and
puts the needs of human beings before those of corporations. We may
not be able to change the direction of the megacorporations, but we
can work together to build solutions beyond them - to build an
alternative technological road together, and to resist the dangerous
path they have set us upon.
