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Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination -- Arundhati Roy www.equator.org/articles/aru... 🧵

"You can no longer use your instincts. You have to use the App.Now that AI owns the em dash, what will future generations make of Emily Dickinson & her love of them? Has she been fed to the machine, too? Will they love her less? Are we being gradually locked out of language? Does it matter anymore?"

"AI has crashed into the world of literature, leaving writers, publishers, teachers & students feeling the ground give way under their feet. Professors must now look at student assignments with distrust. Publishers have to evaluate new writers like detectives inspecting a potential crime scene"

"everything that was once alive has been skinned and stuffed, and regards you unblinkingly, with a meaningful glint in its bright, spurious eyes. It’s like looking at someone & wondering if it’s really who you think it is. Or looking in mirror &seeing your likeness, but knowing it isn’t really you"

"In time, we may forfeit that knowledge, too. Then we will no longer know who we are, or even if we are."

"And when this happens to a whole society, a whole species, when we can no longer rely on instincts that have been learned over centuries, passed down from generation to generation, when we can no longer trust our hearts, our eyes or our ears, when we can no longer tell truth from falsehood or the >

virtual from the real, when time collapses & the past, present & future run into each other, when a million languages & cultures are pureed into glop, when an ancient social compact – whatever its limitations and flaws – is smashed beyond recognition, are we setting ourselves up for mass psychosis?"

"What followed Coxon’s resignation was bewildering. The CEOs of the biggest AI companies fell over each other in their rush to discuss, disagree or concur with the whistleblower who had exposed them"

"Having established their suzerainty over our species, they reassured us that they were doing their best to mitigate risk. They made plea for government regulation.Their cry for help hinted at some sort of pathology. There was something a little kinky about it–a sort of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! vibe"

The oligarchs do seem to believe in their extinction narrative. But extinction is not what they are selling us. Progress,glory & the good of mankind are the marrow of their sales pitch.Thiel has even gone so far as to call critics & those calling 4 regulation “Anti-Christ” who are courting the devil

"Interestingly, the oligarchs seem to be a lot more comfortable with Jacob Coxon than they are with some other whistleblowers. They did not rally in defence of Meredith Whittaker who resigned from Google in 2019 after she called out its contract to build machine vision technology for US drones."

"There was no outbreak of oligarch support when Timnit Gebru, one of the very few black women in a senior technical role in Silicon Valley, was fired from Google in 2020 for refusing to take down a research paper she had co-authored"

"Why would Whittaker & Gebru & their very specific indictments worry the oligarchs more than the prophets of all-out extinction like the AI scientist-turned-critic Hinton, or Jacob Coxon? Perhaps because, like a big fireworks display, Hinton and Coxon’s warnings add frisson to the atmospherics"

"They end up augmenting the oligarchs’ power play, which, when their companies go public, as they are set to do soon, will serve them very well indeed. Their valuations will depend on how sophisticated – and, in the case of AI weapons systems, how lethal – their models are."

"Cyclopes’ extinction orgy appeared to many industry watchers as a set piece staged to persuade an increasingly angry, agitated public how central, important, irreducible and un-roll-backable AI companies are to the US economy, and to the security and future of its people."

"Asking to be regulated is an attempt to graft the industry onto the state, to shut out every last chink of daylight between the government and these corporations. The oligarchs’ hope is that this regulatory embrace will give them the blank cheque they so badly need."

Because the scale of money, land, water and energy that they require can only be provided by the government. Not to put too fine a point on it, what they really want is government permission to self-regulate. Legitimacy without ceding control."