Understanding AI

But long before the internet, philosophers and religious leaders theorized a global connectivity, or collective consciousness. In 1922, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “Noosphere”, or the “thinking layer” of the earth, networking all human thought. In the internet era, his predictions have become surprisingly accurate, now starting to... See more

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the birth of a cosmopolis characterized by a vastly deeper and more comprehensive kind of fixity than that introduced by print technology. An articulation of civilizational memory so rich, deep, and alive, it constitutes something like a planetary awakening, not merely into a new consciousness, but a new memory of... See more

“We would never rely [solely] on the AI-generated summaries,” said Seward. “Reporters are going back and listening to the real [podcasts] but using the report basically as a kind of tip line, or as a nudge to look at something more closely.”

But if you want to win over all the people who benefit from your labor, you need to understand and stress how the products of the AI will be substandard. That they are going to get charged more for worse things. That they have a shared material interest with you.

Will those products be substandard? There is every reason to think so.

I think it's a mistake to conceptualize AI systems as partners, as if they have a will of their own. I don’t think of my pet, my phone, my calculator, or the temperature knob on my stove as partners. I don’t think of any AI system as a partner. The moment we anthropomorphize technology—as if it were a person—we attribute will where none exists. In... See more

To understand the social consequences of LLMs and related forms of AI, we ought consider them as social technologies. Specifically, we should compare them and their workings to other social technologies (or, if you prefer, modes of governance), mapping out how they transform social, political and economic relations among human beings.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.