Alex > Recent Status Updates

The pictures of monkeys help me relate.

In a bid for "mo' money" the AI companies (like Amazon) have secured contracts with which they can extend their tendrils to your doorstep. With the police, NSA or ICE's backing, the AI models can now fully racially profile you, giving you a social credit, in order to judge whether or not you're a terrorist. Anyway, who was Edward Snowden, and why was he relevant?

"some of those refugees are looking way too healthy not to be terrorists" (paraphrased)
Other than that, AI-bros definitely are human.

Starting with a faulty theory: that emotions are universally expressed in the same way, and thus can be read with a degree of certainty from the faces of people. The experiment is also flawed, but who cares? This set the base for AI's facial recognition, and mainly the same woo as lie detectors. Even the database is built mainly on white American people, which gives AI-agents even a racist streak.

In order for the AI to predict anything, it must be able to recognise what it's working with. Classification of objects is a relatively simple thing. However, when it comes to humans, it gets complicated. Not only are several identities vague at best, but complete ethnic categories are laden with racist (or colonial) subtext. There is also a whole point to be made about slurs being also used as categories.

" [IBM's researchers state]"aspects of our heritage (...) are reflected in our faces." This claim goes against decades of research that has challenged the idea that race, gender and identity are biological categories at all but are better understood as politically, culturally and socially constructed."
So, AI lobbed us some +/- 50 years in the past, racism-wise.

Data, in the world of AI, is presented as something neutral, unbiased. This however is not the case: already in the 1980's datasets were created using sets of data, without questioning whether or not the data 'mining' (personal data now being seen as a natural resource) was ethical or not, whether or not it harmed a specific group in the way it was presented.

This chapter was about labour, and time-keeping. We've seen how AI is used in a Fordian sort of way closely watching the time expended by the workers, in order to make production more effective. A Panopticon of sorts, if you will.

Or an Amazon warehouse.

An introduction to the concept of the Potemkin-village and the Panopticon. Both have a certain relation to Gen-AI. The Panopticon because both that and AI are ways to keep an eye on a multitude of workers and/or prisoners by extending the least amount of labour.
The Potemkin-village (colloquially known as an "image d'Épinal" in French) because everything is a facade and covering the labour of actual people.

"When a company introduces a new AI platform, workers are rarely allowed to opt out. This is less of a collaboration than a forced engagement, where workers are expected to re-skill, keep up, and unquestioningly accept each new technical development."

I think that's important to keep in mind.

I'm starting to see a pattern. The kind of pattern that is so obvious that we confused it for "how things are"

Oh fuck.

"The tech sector heavily publicizes its environmental policies, sustainability initiatives, and plans to address climate-related problems using AI as a problem-solving tool. It is all part of a highly produced public image of a sustainable tech industry with no carbon emissions. In reality, it takes a gargantuan amount of enery(...)"
Oh, so it's not even an original idea.

Chapter 2 is less racist, which is good. Here we're exploring how violence and power have a symbiotic relationship, and how both can only be used with consent.
If the agents of violence (police, other forces of order) or the public (either victim or spectator), retracts its consent, then the use of violence to legitimate power is void, and power itself is invalidated.
At least, that's how I understood it.

"Negro students (...) their interest was only to lower academic standards."
Woah, watch the language. Arendt did a lot of good work on her reflections on evil and totalitarianism, but she does have this bit where she's... very racist.

The more I read, the more I realise the protagonist is an asshole.
His brother is now also suffering surprise violence.

Zoveel cliffhangers dat het hele etentje precies op de rand van de tafel lijkt geserveerd.

Socrates and Glaucon (and Plato, perhaps) being the first ever recorded chuds by saying that poetry, and art in general, is bad (and therefore not accepted in their Supercool State (tm)) because it is an imitation of the imitation of some ideal object or situation, and more importantly: it makes you feel feelings for people who may or may not have existed in probably fictitious situations.

"And if there be a pleasure in being filled with that which is according to nature, that which is more really filled with more real being will more really and truly enjoy true pleasure; whereas that which participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied, and will participate in an illusory and less real pleasure?"

This is a very intricate sex joke.

"-which has more pure being - that which is concerned with the invariable, the immortal, and the true, (...) or that which is concerned with and found in the variable and mortal, and is itself variable and mortal?
-Far purer is the being of that which is concerned with the invariable"
Plato, despite being concerned with the immortal, is himself invariably mortal. Therefore, he refuted his own reality.

After several revolutions, we have arrived at tyranny. So first, we have Timocracy, the rule of the honourable and by definition good but unsustainable, then aristocracy (or oligarchy) which is the evolution through luxuries from timocracy, then democracy, which is tackled in harsh terms (though take one late train and you'll agree with Socrates) to finally come to tyranny, which seems the death of the ideal state.

Socrates accurately (ish) predicting in what conditions a revolution happens.

The cave! It's the cave parable!

Boy, Socrates (and Plato) really didn't like artists.

"And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul percieves and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and theb of another, and seems to have no intelligence?"

What a way to insult someone.

Apparently giving your money to women and/or slaves is bad.

It wouldn't be ancient Greece if we weren't treating women like disposable objects.

Justice stems from harmony, disharmony stems from people in disagreement with each other. Most disagreements stem from people fighting over stuff labeled "mine" or "not mine" and "his" and "not his".
Therefore, the most just state has no private property.
(The International starts playing in the background)