Thome Ptacek, with whom I alternate between disagreement and agreement at approximately 50hz, writes about AI, amicably titling his article “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts” (and that’s how you get to #1 on Hacker News, which is where I posted a version of this comment:
It’s something I’ve struggled with for a while — pre-ChatGPT, in fact, when I cadged an account to the then closed-invite OpenAI service for EFF. Then, it was an attempt to get ahead of what was coming — both the positive and negative sides of the incoming storm. I struggled with the imbalance that I saw in even private conversations: after a couple of decades of working in settings where the possibilities of technology to bring agency and autonomy to people was foremost, this conversation signalled the reversion to the mean of analysis, which was to either shake down the new advance for its risks, or just ignore it entirely as out of scope for the current threats and problems.
As somebody who comes from a politically left family, and was also around in the early days of the Web, I think this reaction has a left-cultural element to it. The left has strong roots in being able to effectively critique new developments, economic and social — at least those that don’t come from its own engines of innovation which have for the 150 years revolved around those critiques, plus solidarity, organization, and sociopolitical action.
In my lifetime, the movement’s theorists have worked far more slowly on how to integrate the effect of those changes into its vision. That means when some new transformative tool comes along outside that vision, the left’s cultural norms err on the side of critique. Which is fine, but it makes any other expression both hard to convey, and instantly suspect in those communities.
I saw this in the early Web, where from a small group of early adopters of all political slants, it was the independents, heterodox leftists (including anarchists), and the right, — and most vocally, the libertarians — who were able to most quickly adapt to and adopt the new technology. Academic leftists, especially Marxists, and those who were inspired by them, took a lot longer to accomodate the Net into their theses (beyond disregarding or rejecting it) and even longer to devise practical uses for it.
It wasn’t that long, I should say — a matter of months or years, and any latent objections were quickly swamped by younger voices who were familiar with the power of the Net; but from my point of view it seriously set back that movement in practicality and popularity during the 80s and 90s.
I see the same with AI: the left has attracted a large generational of support across the world from providing an emotionally resonant and practical alternative to the status quo many people face. But you quickly lose the mandate of heaven if you fail to do more than just simplistically critique or reject a thing that the average person in the world comes to feel they know better, or feels differently toward, than you do. This is something to consider, even if you still strongly believe yourselves to be correct in the critiques.
Socially, critiques of the outside world bond us together: they give us a counter-narrative, and help supply arguments and language for opposition. But critique can’t be enough; technology is a tool for action, and the skills and deep intuitions about it was always fall to those who study and adopt it over those who stand athwart it, and yell stop — whichever euclidean politics you fall back upon.
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