Understanding AI

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.

DP: Writing now has to be really, really good to stand out. People got really upset last December when I tweeted that AI’s writing is already better than the majority of Write of Passage students would be with a day’s worth of work. It made a lot of people upset, but I think it’s true. AI’s writing is great with a good prompt, which is why people... See more

But even when AI becomes more sophisticated, it will still be backwards looking, relying on an analysis of things-already-done. There’s certainly some truth to the claim that ‘everything is remix’ (Harry Potter = Star Wars; Jaws = Beowulf). But only some. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that ‘everything is remix + experience’. Truly creative... See more

As Cosma and I, and Alison and James have written:

We now have a technology that does for written and pictured culture what largescale markets do for the economy, what large-scale bureaucracy does for society, and perhaps even comparable with what print once did for language. What happens next?

In this world, control is primarily in the hands of people and organizations; indeed, a greater and greater proportion of what people do in their jobs is AI control.

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

But he saw AI (a term that he had ambiguous feelings about) as a particular variant of a much broader phenomenon: “complex information processing.” Human beings have quite limited internal ability to process information, and confront an unpredictable and complex world. Hence, they rely on a variety of external arrangements that do much of their... See more

This shift in perspective clarifies that humans have always used technology to increase our ability to control our environment. There are few biological or physiological differences between ancestral and modern humans; instead, the relevant differences are improved knowledge and understanding, tools, technology and, indeed, AI. In a sense, modern... See more