Jeff Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world, worth about $205bn (£163bn). That money doesn’t come out of nowhere. It doesn’t drop out of a pier-end slot machine called, “I learned to code at Princeton and that’s why I’m better than you”. It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference.
I also wrote a short follow-up piece on my blog about the work of Sven Lindqvist, and particularly his book Dig Where You Stand, which partly inspired this piece. Here's a nice bit about steam engines:
“To me the steam engine is a time machine,” says Ron Plaster. “When I work on one of them, I feel it’s a way to enter history, knock off the rust, take it to pieces, clean it, polish it, oil it and start again. You can sense the odor of history, you hear it hissing and puffing when the steam is admitted. You can feel history tremble under the pressure, see it start slowly and begin to move, you see how history works — that’s what’s so fantastic.”
Meanwhile, I've been building chairs. More specifically, I've been asking various "Artificial Intelligences" (aka Large Language Models) to help me design chairs based on bits of wood I've got lying around. The results have been interesting:
AI Chair 1.0, designed in collaboration with ChatGPTAI Chair 1.1, designed in collaboration with Mistral
Cloud Index, my critique of AI prediction systems originally commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries, is on show in the exhibition Decoding the Black Box at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen in Germany.
