deathmtn

On February 3, speaking in Greenwich, the home of the Royal Naval College, [Boris] Johnson pitted Britain and its commitment to free trade not only against the EU, but against pandemic panic. "When there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational, to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government, somewhere, that is willing … to make the case ... for freedom of exchange. Some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth, and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other."

There is still a widespread belief that automation, computerization and the use of robotic devices will free human beings from soul destroying, routine, backbreaking tasks and leave them free to engage in more creative work. It is further suggested that this is automatically going to lead to a shorter working week, longer
holidays and more leisure time--that in an all round way it is going to result in an "improvement in the quality of life.'." It is usually added, as a sort of occupational bonus, that the masses of data we will have available to us from computers will make our decisions so much more creative, scientific and logical, and that as a result we will have a more rational form of society.

I want to question some of these assumptions and attempt to show that we are beginning to repeat in the field of intellectual work most of the mistakes already made in the field of skilled manual work at an earlier historical stage when it was subjected to the use of high capital equipment.

Lensa generates its avatars using Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that generates images based on text prompts. Stable Diffusion is built using LAION-5B, a massive open-source data set that has been compiled by scraping images off the internet.

And because the internet is overflowing with images of naked or barely dressed women, and pictures reflecting sexist, racist stereotypes, the data set is also skewed toward these kinds of images.

This leads to AI models that sexualize women regardless of whether they want to be depicted that way, Caliskan says—especially women with identities that have been historically disadvantaged.

AI training data is filled with racist stereotypes, pornography, and explicit images of rape, researchers Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, and Emmanuel Kahembwe found after analyzing a data set similar to the one used to build Stable Diffusion.

Lists lack structure. They beg the question of order and weighting. What is the underlying principle that organizes the separate points? Are they an expression of our mental incapacity to satisfying synthesize or to discern the deeper underlying logic? Are they, indeed, something worse, a failure to face up to the stark fact that at the root of everything there is one basic causal driver? Capitalism, for sake of argument. To that extent is the “baggy” (not to say carrier bag) theory of polycrisis an ideological snare, a failure of intellectual backbone, of moral fibre on the part of the analyst?

Obviously, I think not. In fact, I’m persuaded by the opposite point of view. If you are not willing to face the “baggy”, inchoate nature of our current situation, if you are not willing to take seriously the possibility that our situation is historically novel (as in a product of the “great acceleration”, of which there is a dawning awareness in social and environmental sciences since the 1970s etc etc) and that this fundamentally challenges our existing frameworks of analysis (as grasped amongst others by Ulrich Beck), then you are involved in a kind of escapism that may turn out to be dangerous. But let’s come back to that on another, more leisured occasion.

Other leaders had similar reactions. “My concerns are raised when I’m advised to not disclose what seems to be a contractual relationship to the press,” one of the top managers at the pathology center, Col. Edward Stevens, told Olson. Stevens told Olson that giving Google access to this information without a competitive bid could result in litigation from the company’s competitors. Stevens asked: “Does this need to go through an open-source bid?”

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In exchange for scanning and digitizing the slide collection at its own expense, Google sought “exclusive access” to the data for at least four years.

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When Google was not selected for the pilot project, the company went above the JPC leaders’ heads. Google claimed in a letter to Pentagon leaders that the company had been unfairly excluded from “full and open competition.” In that August 2021 letter, Google argued that the nation’s security was at stake. It asked the DOD to “consider allowing Google Cloud” and other providers to compete to ensure the “nation’s ability to compete with China in biotechnology.”