Regarding the last boost: if there were a functional left politics in the United States, it would have pushed back vigorously and relentlessly against the cloud and would still be doing so today. In Marx's terms, the cloud removes the means of production from the hands of the workers and places them under the control of corporations. In that way the movement of most digital work into the cloud is analogous to the trends the Luddites were fighting against, with the movement of skilled weaving work into factories performed by loom operators and subsequent deskilling of weavers.
This should have been vigorously resisted as it was unfolding, but it was not as far as I can remember. It should be vigorously opposed now, but it is not. Data centers, our modern mills, are consuming vast quantities of critical resources like electric power and clean water, to the point that there are communities struggling to provide these resources to human beings who live there. Yet the pushback against this expansion is muted, and data centers are expanding rapidly. Where is the left's response to this corporate seizure of the means of production?
People are worried about generative AI taking jobs, and rightly so, but I think these concerns point to an overarching trend towards a kind of digital feudalization. Generative AI is already created by taking peoples' hard work without any compensation. You're permitted to use the technology "free of charge", but you can't pay the rent or mortgage, or buy food, with ChatGPT output. This essentially renders all of us as peasants.
The threat from bosses that you could be fired and replaced with generative AI, even if false, presses down wage demands and encourages doing work for no compensation. In this climate, people feel compelled to learn how to use generative AI to do their work because they perceive (again, probably rightly) that if they don't do that they will eventually find themselves without employment opportunities. Once again, if you're in a position of doing uncompensated work like this on behalf of a powerful entity, you are in a relationship distressingly similar to the one a peasant was in to a lord in the feudal system.
I'm not saying anything new here, just thinking out loud. But doesn't the left have anything to say, loudly proudly and often, about this? These are bread and butter issues for the left, aren't they?
#AI #GenAI #GPT #ChatGPT #cloud #DataCenters #USPolitics #left
This should have been vigorously resisted as it was unfolding, but it was not as far as I can remember. It should be vigorously opposed now, but it is not. Data centers, our modern mills, are consuming vast quantities of critical resources like electric power and clean water, to the point that there are communities struggling to provide these resources to human beings who live there. Yet the pushback against this expansion is muted, and data centers are expanding rapidly. Where is the left's response to this corporate seizure of the means of production?
People are worried about generative AI taking jobs, and rightly so, but I think these concerns point to an overarching trend towards a kind of digital feudalization. Generative AI is already created by taking peoples' hard work without any compensation. You're permitted to use the technology "free of charge", but you can't pay the rent or mortgage, or buy food, with ChatGPT output. This essentially renders all of us as peasants.
The threat from bosses that you could be fired and replaced with generative AI, even if false, presses down wage demands and encourages doing work for no compensation. In this climate, people feel compelled to learn how to use generative AI to do their work because they perceive (again, probably rightly) that if they don't do that they will eventually find themselves without employment opportunities. Once again, if you're in a position of doing uncompensated work like this on behalf of a powerful entity, you are in a relationship distressingly similar to the one a peasant was in to a lord in the feudal system.
I'm not saying anything new here, just thinking out loud. But doesn't the left have anything to say, loudly proudly and often, about this? These are bread and butter issues for the left, aren't they?
#AI #GenAI #GPT #ChatGPT #cloud #DataCenters #USPolitics #left
