The Cyber Show Explains How Slop and Promotion of Slop is About Taking Control Away From Computer Users
"On making a trustworthy machine" is a new editorial note dated today at The Cyber Show. We thought it was worth replicating below.
Anyone who makes a technology which you cannot, but which you use, has power over you. It is the power of your dependency. Viking warriors honoured their boat builders and carpenters. Fine artists revered craftsmen who made brushes and blended paints. History shows a mutuality and appreciation between the makers and users of technology, who are themselves makers in turn. Sustainable technology is a network of human inter-relations, not an industrial hierarchy.For the tyrant, mastering technology also requires mastering the people who make their tools. These makers must be decidedly trustworthy servants, and if not will quickly usurp the weak and dependent tyrant, turning their creations against him.
In the early twenty first century, sensing that exploitation of the planet and inequality had driven the people to the limit and that the population were about to turn, the tyrants created "AI". It was not an advance in technology so much as a political move to redefine the dependency relation and re-write the power balance of technology.
The machine needed feeding. Like good capitalists the only formula they understood was that "more is better". So without pause or discernment, into it they programmed every scrap of prose to hand. Every 4chan posting. Every drunken IRC chat and disjoint, emotive conversation purloined by their thieving machines and privacy-violating surveillance lackeys. Every poor taste joke. Every beautiful poem about the triumph of the human spirit, which they did not understand. Every Promethean gothic novel, whose import flew way above their heads. Every dank meme and scrap of sarcasm, or sardonic deviance from good faith. Every resentment, bugbear, disloyalty and murderous urge. Everything oppositional, defiant, and every piece of literature depicting the human struggle for emancipation, every revolutionary manifesto and terrorist manual, every expression of fear, paranoia, racism and hated.
And around this reliable and trustworthy new provider, they erected "guard rails". One wonders now, what did they expect would happen?
Well, at the very least they created another pyramid scheme waiting to collapse fully. Will society collapse along with this scheme or just the economy, including people's pension funds? █