Sure, it’s not magical in that sense, but one big difference is that programming is used widely and largely by people who barely know what they’re doing. People have a problem, they realize they could automate it in some way, throw some code together and tweak it till it does what they need. There’s often very little understanding of what’s happening involved there. People just glue bits of code they find on sites like SO till stuff sort of works. I think this is where the whole magic metaphor becomes applicable. People just learn random incantations that seem to do what they need. What’s actually happening or why is completely opaque to them.
Meanwhile, the problem of people lacking understanding of how important the industrial base is extends to a lot of other aspects of society. Most people don’t know where their food or energy comes from, they don’t understand how supply chains work, and so on. And the economic war with Russia shows just how pervasive the problem is. Pretty much everybody in the west assumed that Russia couldn’t possibly compete with the west economically because on paper western GDP is much higher. However, much it comes from ephemeral things like software development and the service industry. Now people are shocked to discover that what Russia has is a strong industrial base while the west doesn’t, and that’s what really counts.
Agree. I do think the western ruling class, at the very top levels, understands how important an industrial base is; they just thought they could relocate it to China, and by enslaving the Chinese people economically, could ensure that the PRC remains the “world’s factory” for the foreseeable future. They never envisioned that the Chinese would use foreign investments to build up their own sovereign economy, and eventually become a competitor to the west.
My read: the fact that western governments are currently throwing everything they’ve got at AI development represents little more than their desperate, last-ditch attempt to hold on to economic supremacy. It was hoped that China could be bullied back into a subordinate position, by fomenting unrest within the country and initiating a trade war; that failed. Meanwhile (as you’ve pointed out), the proxy war with Russia showed just how weak western economies really are. Now, US and European economic planners are hoping that some new miracle technology will come and save them from the mess they’re in. AI, in short, is the Wunderwaffe of a failed economic war. Hence, I think, the reason for all the hype about Skynet, the Matrix, etc. It’s partly just that – hype – but it also represents a real hope on the part of the capitalist ruling class, that technology will institute a new paradigm and somehow free them from reliance on China.
(Which brings me to AI art and text generators, the applications of machine learning which seem to have the most people viscerally spooked. There is nothing really very remarkable here; people have known since the 18th century that language and representational art follow patterns that can be mathematically quantified, and that given enough computing power, you could theoretically get a machine to generate speech, pictures, music, etc. But there is also a mystique to the artistic process, and it is felt that a machine which can “create” is somehow one step away from being conscious. Thus the hype around Chat GPT and other programs – which even at their best, produce work indistinguishable from that of a competent, uninspired human workman – is partly propaganda, partly sincerely felt delusion. We are on the cusp of new millennium, an era of magic abundance, where something can finally be generated from nothing; which aspiration should show us that, in the west, we are no longer dealing with rational actors).
Agreed, and I think there’s another aspect to this. One of the goals with globalization is to ensure that no one country is self sufficient. Can’t seize the means of production when they’ve been shipped out half way across the world. The original plan was to privatize China and then do the same shit there, but China proved to be smarter than that.
I agree that AI is largely hopium, and this strategy has already failed. AI tech was supposed to be owned by companies like Google and MS who’d run big server farms and charge access to these systems. Turns out that whole idea is now dead because people figured out how to combine training from models. You no longer need millions of dollars to train a machine learning system, and thanks to advancements in pruning the neural nets, these can now be run on a laptop achieving similar results to what stuff like ChatGPT can do. Obviously, whatever useful aspects this tech has will also be adopted by China going forward. The amount of hype around AI is obviously off the scale, and eventually people are going to sober up about it.
Incidentally, this is a really good read on how the west is losing in automation to China right now. I don’t think any hare brained schemes westerners come up with are going to change the trajectory.
Sure, it’s not magical in that sense, but one big difference is that programming is used widely and largely by people who barely know what they’re doing. People have a problem, they realize they could automate it in some way, throw some code together and tweak it till it does what they need. There’s often very little understanding of what’s happening involved there. People just glue bits of code they find on sites like SO till stuff sort of works. I think this is where the whole magic metaphor becomes applicable. People just learn random incantations that seem to do what they need. What’s actually happening or why is completely opaque to them.
Meanwhile, the problem of people lacking understanding of how important the industrial base is extends to a lot of other aspects of society. Most people don’t know where their food or energy comes from, they don’t understand how supply chains work, and so on. And the economic war with Russia shows just how pervasive the problem is. Pretty much everybody in the west assumed that Russia couldn’t possibly compete with the west economically because on paper western GDP is much higher. However, much it comes from ephemeral things like software development and the service industry. Now people are shocked to discover that what Russia has is a strong industrial base while the west doesn’t, and that’s what really counts.
Agree. I do think the western ruling class, at the very top levels, understands how important an industrial base is; they just thought they could relocate it to China, and by enslaving the Chinese people economically, could ensure that the PRC remains the “world’s factory” for the foreseeable future. They never envisioned that the Chinese would use foreign investments to build up their own sovereign economy, and eventually become a competitor to the west.
My read: the fact that western governments are currently throwing everything they’ve got at AI development represents little more than their desperate, last-ditch attempt to hold on to economic supremacy. It was hoped that China could be bullied back into a subordinate position, by fomenting unrest within the country and initiating a trade war; that failed. Meanwhile (as you’ve pointed out), the proxy war with Russia showed just how weak western economies really are. Now, US and European economic planners are hoping that some new miracle technology will come and save them from the mess they’re in. AI, in short, is the Wunderwaffe of a failed economic war. Hence, I think, the reason for all the hype about Skynet, the Matrix, etc. It’s partly just that – hype – but it also represents a real hope on the part of the capitalist ruling class, that technology will institute a new paradigm and somehow free them from reliance on China.
(Which brings me to AI art and text generators, the applications of machine learning which seem to have the most people viscerally spooked. There is nothing really very remarkable here; people have known since the 18th century that language and representational art follow patterns that can be mathematically quantified, and that given enough computing power, you could theoretically get a machine to generate speech, pictures, music, etc. But there is also a mystique to the artistic process, and it is felt that a machine which can “create” is somehow one step away from being conscious. Thus the hype around Chat GPT and other programs – which even at their best, produce work indistinguishable from that of a competent, uninspired human workman – is partly propaganda, partly sincerely felt delusion. We are on the cusp of new millennium, an era of magic abundance, where something can finally be generated from nothing; which aspiration should show us that, in the west, we are no longer dealing with rational actors).
Agreed, and I think there’s another aspect to this. One of the goals with globalization is to ensure that no one country is self sufficient. Can’t seize the means of production when they’ve been shipped out half way across the world. The original plan was to privatize China and then do the same shit there, but China proved to be smarter than that.
I agree that AI is largely hopium, and this strategy has already failed. AI tech was supposed to be owned by companies like Google and MS who’d run big server farms and charge access to these systems. Turns out that whole idea is now dead because people figured out how to combine training from models. You no longer need millions of dollars to train a machine learning system, and thanks to advancements in pruning the neural nets, these can now be run on a laptop achieving similar results to what stuff like ChatGPT can do. Obviously, whatever useful aspects this tech has will also be adopted by China going forward. The amount of hype around AI is obviously off the scale, and eventually people are going to sober up about it.
Incidentally, this is a really good read on how the west is losing in automation to China right now. I don’t think any hare brained schemes westerners come up with are going to change the trajectory.