There are many problems with the idea of artificial intelligence, but one of the worst is that it assumes “intelligence” can be measured objectively. And then, because Silicon Valley funds AI development, intelligence is assigned a monetary value. AI is like a mind that has been reduced to various cuts of meat, which are then sold as commodities.
That sounds like a twenty-first century cyberpunk scenario, but in fact people have been quantifying intelligence and putting a price tag on thought for over a century. IQ tests became popular in the 1910s, and were used to determine people’s eligibility for work, schooling, and even civil rights. In 1923, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács wrote a powerful essay about how capitalism shapes the consciousness of knowledge workers. He described how “[the worker’s] qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world.” What Lukács described, ultimately, was a form of labor where we are forced to think thoughts that are not our own.
If you’ve ever wondered why it feels like work is taking control of your mind, your emotions, and your conscience – well, that’s the subjective experience of being commodified. You are slicing up your consciousness and selling pieces of it to survive.
Apps like ChatGPT and Midjourney are perfect expressions of how capitalism treats the human mind. AI as we know it is not based on human qualities and personalities. It is based on the minds of workers whose thoughts have been turned into objects that do not belong to them.
If generative algorithms are models of human intelligence, then they are not a model for the messy complexity that makes an actual human. They are a model of a fully exploited knowledge worker, whose imagination belongs to a corporation, and whose creative contributions remain unacknowledged in the production of writing and art they cannot claim as their own.
In other news ...
I recently published two reviews of books I highly recommend. For the Washington Post, I reviewed engineer Deb Chachra’s essential How Infrastructure Works. Here’s a taste:
Perhaps the most valuable insight in this book is that good infrastructure is built for resilience, not optimization. Right now, many of us are in thrall to the idea that the best systems are always optimized. As Chachra explains, an optimized system may maximize profit, but profit should not be our motive in any system that sustains life and safety. Infrastructure should be redundant and full of slack, so that we always have backup power, extra water and alternate routes in our transit networks. She writes movingly about how planners should use caretaking as a model for development. Healthy infrastructure requires many workers to do routine, incremental maintenance. Sometimes they tend to systems that are only used occasionally, in times of extreme need. This may feel wasteful from a capitalist perspective, but it will feel vital when ice storms destroy the electrical grid.
And for the New York Times books section, I wrote about one of my science fiction heroes: Joanna Russ, whose key works of fiction were recently collected in a single volume from Library of America. Here’s a sample:
Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was one of the great writers of the 20th century, but she is also one of those authors you either know intimately or have never heard of. She wrote prickly, violent stories about lesbian heroes who slay patriarchs, and adventure tales about bold women who swashbuckle across the multiverse. These tropes win fans and Oscars today, but Russ was publishing in the 1960s and ’70s, when women simply weren’t supposed to write like that. At least, not if they wanted to be taken seriously. She was an outsider in the literary world for writing about the future, but her space marauders were too queer for the science fiction crowd. And so she never really found a comfortable place in literary history.
In my New Scientist column, I wrote about how indigenous researchers are using AI to teach their languages to a new generation, and how celebrity gossip online is the ultimate distraction from news of the war in Gaza. (To read these columns, you need to create a free account.)
Want a free, signed book for the holidays?
I’ve got a box of the new paperbacks of The Terraformers, waiting for your grabby hands! The first ten people to reply to this email with a request for a signed book will get one (U.S. only, with apologies – I'm afraid that sending it abroad is too expensive.)
I also have three copies of Four Lost Cities in Chinese translation, fresh from the publisher in Beijing, and if you’d like one of those let me know. They are gorgeous hardcovers. They’ll go to the first three people to reply to this email with a request for one! (U.S. only, again my apologies.)
If you don't manage to get a free book, but still want me to sign and/or personalize a book for you or a pal, you can order them from my local bookstore, Folio, right here.