Michelle Shevin

@michebox.bsky.social

121 Followers 176 Following

Future Preservation Society

…Computers are very useful in many contexts. They are not a vision of the future. The ones you’ve been hearing are ‘getting so good we should be worried they’ll take over’ are more akin to several layers of human-directed exploitation and extraction in a trench coat than they are ‘reasoning machines’ or promising sites for ‘social progress.’ We should be worried: not that super ‘intelligent’ machines are taking over, but that while waiting breathlessly for their arrival we are busy putting dumb ones in charge. For those who intuit this, it can be tempting to passively observe the dimensional collapse of datafication. In this Flatland nothing matters unless it can be measured and managed, and “intelligence” is just whatever computers can do. It can be lulling to interpret this overt absurdity as the swan song of a paradigm losing its grip — a story about concentrated power and limitless consumption no longer believed or believable… https://medium.com/@michebox/possibility-power-plan-1ac2fc506dfa