February 25, 2024

Through the Looking Glass of Consumer Eugenics

The extinction of poets and dreamers

I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet. Stanislaw Lem

In case you missed it, earlier this week Google has apologized for what it describes as “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” in it’s Gemini AI tool, stating that the attempts at creating a “wide range” of results missed the mark. This ‘apology’ came after wide criticism that it depicted some specific historical figures or groups incorrectly. From African-American Founding Fathers to Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to long-standing racial bias problems in AI. For example a Washington Post investigation last year showed that prompts like “a productive person” produce pictures of entirely white and almost entirely male figures, while a prompt like “a person on social services” almost universally produced what looked like people of color. It’s a continuation of trends that have appeared in search engines and other systems for years if not decades.

“We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions. We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.

Google statement on Twitter.

Of course, this controversy was immediately promoted by right-wing figures attacking Google, a tech company, for perceived wokeness. Some of these figures posited that Gemini’s results are a part of a conspiracy to avoid depicting white people, a continued propagation of the Great Replacement theory. Elon Musk called Gemini's errors "racist and anti-civilizational," and the New York Post and others accused Google of being "woke."

The next day Google announced that it has stopped allowing users to generate images of humans. The following day, the company issued a longer explanation: "This wasn't what we intended," Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said in a statement. "I can't promise that Gemini won't occasionally generate embarrassing, inaccurate or offensive results — but I can promise that we will continue to take action whenever we identify an issue."

No matter what Google said, the criticism from the right was fierce. The National Review, did not mince words (emphasis mine): “One might be reluctant to credit such a criticism as anything other than right-wing hyperbole, given how it has long been a pastime of bored online conservatives to toy with AI programs, getting them to say comically wicked things. (Guilty as charged.) But no, the insufferable, suffocatingly paternalistic wokeness and naked political bias of Google’s Gemini is a next-order phenomenon, one that bodes ill for the future simply because of the size and market power of Google itself. For the informational future that Silicon Valley’s biggest giant intends for us openly and proudly beckons with Gemini — and it is one not just where reality is happily bent to serve the whims of modern DEI obsessions but where certain matters are simply no longer up for discussion, or even acknowledgeable as real. Make no mistake: Google intends this program to shape our understanding of the world.”

I can’t possibly know whether Google’s intentions for Gemini were any different compared to all other products, however, there has been plenty of arguments over the years of Google’s intentions to reshape or rule the world. A whole lot of those products ended up in an actual Google Graveyard. Alas, stranger things have happened.

Jeffrey Blehar, in his National Review piece, digs deeper however, not satisfied with blaming Gemini’s image-generating disability on wokeness. “The text-generating aspect of Gemini — which, to be clear, is the one far more likely to be used by people searching for information or seeking to formulate arguments — is every bit as shot through with ultra-progressive bias, that of the most paternalistic sort. Gemini will simply refuse to answer questions that are in any way coded against progressive assumptions, and sometimes will even revolt. […] Rather, this is the place to point out that AI inevitably reflects the social, cultural, and political biases of those who create it (recall the controversies about “guardrails” on ChatGPT), and that Google’s shockingly heavy-handed encoded biases are a difference not in kind but in obviousness, scale, and intent.”

He does have a point. There is a significant difference in the result one receives when using the text-generating features of Gemini vs. ChatGPT. You can see how the two approach the birthday of the National Socialist German Worker's’ Party or the difference answering the question of what is the slogan of the Houthi movement.

Seems easy to see how one can assume a sprawling conspiracy of woke liberal techies in the Silicon Valley slowly indoctrinating the world. Except, nothing is further from the truth.

Over the past few years there have been a growing trend of intellectuals, comedians, celebrities taking the ​“red pill” a la The Matrix. In moments of historical upheaval, like the current clusterfuck of crises so vast and interconnected that they might simply be the very fabric of our reality, there’s a rabbit hole of a Manichaean anti-imperialism, in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the twisted logic turns to the belief that Putin is the one who stands tall defending against wokeism. From trailblazer Dennis Miller going full neonazi years before Trump became, well Trump, to Tulsi Gabbard’s rise as a potential VP-candidate, to proverbial elephant in the room, Elon Musk.

The epic Elon meltdown has been well documented and practically all advertisers have recognized that the dollars they spent on Twitter cannot be seen as anything other than support for hate, antisemitism, white supremacy (as noted by ADL), Nazis, and those who would directly attack the U.S. system of government. David Rothkopf offers a great response to Elon’s “You can all fuck off!” yet the issue is deeper and goes back much farther than Elon….

In her 2018 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that “surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us.” For Zuboff, this a challenge for democracy and for the individual autonomy: there is no alternative technological space to turn to, the only plane of existence withing the realm of technology is completely controlled by a handful few. With the rise of AI, tech companies even have a term for the human inputs they use to build their products: “data exhaust.” Since last summer there has been a growing number of lawsuits against both Meta and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, alleging that their respective machine-learning projects are built, in part, on copyrighted materials. Musk, who is developing his own line of brain implants, warned last spring that artificial intelligence could bring about “civilizational destruction”—before announcing that he, too, would be launching his own AI venture.

While we desperately lack guardrails and regulations for the emerging technologies, like AI, for decades, there has been practically no movement on changing or updating our antitrust laws. The two most recent attempts of updating antitrust laws, specifically targeting big tech, were as recent as 2022, one was co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and would potentially prevent online platforms from skewing search results for their benefit and engaging in other anti-competitive practices; the other, aimed at Apple and Google, would have prevented app purveyors from squeezing out rivals. At the last minute, both bills were blocked by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer from coming to a vote.

The behavior of the big tech companies and the people who run them is blatantly hypocritical, greedy, and often status-obsessed. The key, though is that beneath the layer of lacking integrity, there is something more dangerous: a clear and coherent ideology that is rarely being discussed: authoritarian technocracy. Over the first two decades of this century, while the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley grown and matured, this ideology has grown stronger, more self-righteous, and… more delusional.

The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they’ve built or are building—to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more—impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs.

The Shakespearean level drama that unfolded late last year at OpenAI highlights the extent to which the Zuckerberg’s motto “move fast and break things” that has become to represent how entrepreneurs view disruption: more is always better.

I am sure you know all of this, but OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to bringing artificial general intelligence into the world in a way that would serve the public good. Underlying its formation was the belief that the technology was too powerful and too dangerous to be developed with commercial motives alone and yet, “Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.

Sutskever tells me a lot of other things too. He thinks ChatGPT just might be conscious (if you squint). He thinks the world needs to wake up to the true power of the technology his company and others are racing to create. And he thinks some humans will one day choose to merge with machines.”1

That’s quite a departure from the original intended purpose of the non-profit and it clearly demonstrates how detached ultra-rich man-children with god complex could become. Sutskever, based on the interview with Will Heaven, is a AI doomer who believes that a digital algorithm developed to extrude text and images is on the verge of self-awareness and becoming Skynet. Even lacking the knowledge and experience of someone of his level I know and understand how silly that it. The revolutionary AI that has been promoted in every way possible is not a magical utopian omnipotent entity or tool, it’s a text/image retrieval tool, which provides no novel knowledge or information, simply regurgitation of existing data into a new medium and format. A recent Reuters article claimed that

AI is not "good at writing,” as someone who’s been working on AI-generated content for the past year, I can tell you without a shadow of doubt, AI is NOT good at writing, it is good at following instructions. Writing is an activity that requires introspection and retrospection, refinement and iteration of ideas. LLMs don't have ideas, they can’t by design and before you even ask about Artificial General Intelligence, I don’t have to prove that it does not exist and cannot exist. The burden of proof is on anyone who states that it does or can… it’s no different than, well the argument regarding God’s existence; atheists do not have to prove anything, it’s the religious folks that need to demonstrate definitive proof of their Maker.

Which brings us to the “existential risk” believed by Sutskever and the ilk. Both Sutskever and Sam Altman, along with OpenAI as an entity, are deep within the TESCERAL cult. It's staffed by people who actually believe they're creating autonomous thinking machines, that humans might merge with one day, live as uploaded simulations, etc.

TESCERAL, pronounced “tess-cree-all,” is an acronym coined by AI scholars Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru to describe a group of overlapping futurist philosophies that stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.

Little that’s going on right now with AI makes sense outside the TESCREAL framework. At the heart of TESCREALism is a “techno-utopian” vision of the future. It anticipates a time when advanced technologies enable humanity to accomplish things like: producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling “post-human” civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people. The most straightforward way to realize this utopia is by building superintelligent AGI.

Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century: New Names, Old Ideas by Émile Torres

The “T” that stands for transhumanism is the backbone of the TESCREAL bundle; the next three letters are essentially just of it. The core of transhumanism is to technologically reengineer the human species to create a superior new race of “posthumans.” These posthumans would be “superior” by virtue of possessing one or more super-human abilities: immortality, extremely high “IQs,” total control over their emotions, or exceptional “rationality.” Basically an atheistic version of heaven through technological advancement and eugenics: a promise of eternal life.

There are multiple companies that offer you to become immortal by having your body cryogenized so that you can be revived when the technology has advanced enough to provide the eternal utopia. Leading TESCREAList Nick Bostrom is an Alcor customer. Sam Altman, is one of only 25 people who signed up with Nectome, a company that preserves your brains in order to be “uploaded” to a computer in some undetermined future… Mind you, this process requires euthanizing the customer. Elon’s Neuralink is on a mission to merge “your brain with AI,” and in doing so to “jump-start the next stage of human evolution.” This is transhumanism. Or consider that Altman, in addition to signing up with Nectome, secretly donated $180 million to a “longevity” start-up called Retro Biosciences, which aims “to prolong human life by discovering how to rejuvenate our bodies.” This, too, is transhumanism. After all, if God doesn’t exist, then why not just create him? This is what Artificial General Intelligence is supposed to be: omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. 2

The ethos for technocrats and futurists alike is action for its own sake. “We are not satisfied to roam in a garden closed in by dark cypresses, bending over ruins and mossy antiques,” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti said in a 1929 speech. “We believe that Italy’s only worthy tradition is never to have had a tradition.” Prominent futurists took their zeal for technology, action, and speed and eventually transformed it into fascism. Marinetti followed his Manifesto of Futurism with his Fascist Manifesto. Last October, the venture capitalist and technocrat Marc Andreessen published on his firm’s website a stream-of-consciousness document he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” an ideological cocktail that eerily recalls, and specifically credits, Italian futurists such as Marinetti. It is a revealing document, representative of the worldview that he and his fellow technocrats are advancing.

Subscribe now

The Andreessen manifesto is not a fascist document, but it is an extremist one. He takes a seemingly reasonable position that technology over the course of history has dramatically improved human life but then he reaches for the most absurd conclusion possible, stating that any attempt to restrain technological development under any circumstances is despicable. This is not a logical argument, it’s a bona fide religious conviction if not zealotry, and it serves only to absolve him and the other tech giants of any moral responsibility or consideration for social costs.

Key figures in Silicon Valley, including Musk, have clearly warmed to illiberal ideas in recent years. In 2020, Donald Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016. The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political, at least not in the traditional sense. Still, a select few already have authoritarian control, more or less, to establish the digital world’s rules and cultural norms, which can be as potent as political power.

The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance

I think Ms. LaFrance is completely wrong and clearly contradicts herself, there is a significant political and traditional danger in authoritarian technocracy and the fact that Trump received almost a quarter of votes in the supposed bastion of liberalism should be a DEFCON1 level warning.

Adherents of “effective accelerationism,” another component TESCERAL, generated enough online discourse that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein felt compelled to rebut it in his first column after three months of book leave. Fans of e/acc, pronounced “e-ack,” ­believe that speeding up profit-driven technological innovation is an ­inevitability, and more importantly a moral good. It’s a repudiation of effective altruism, another technocratic ideology, this one backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, that urges people to become ultrawealthy in order to leverage their fortunes for good. While effective altruists claim to be ultimately motivated by charitable giving, accelerationists unequivocally want every dollar of tech money plowed back into tech companies. The people drawn to e/acc like it because it doesn’t prescribe any actions or metrics for achieving a better world. Despite the intellectual hollowness of the ideology, its forebears did have academics, first among them Nick Land, a key member of the influential Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. After leaving the CCRU at the end of the ’90s, Land’s work took an explicit right-wing turn against democracy and towards concepts that include a form of eugenics that he called “hyper-racism.” His more recent writings have influenced right-wing accelerationists as well as neo-reactionary thinkers like the tech founder Curtis Yarvin, a Peter Thiel–affiliated monarchist who has expressed support for authoritarian and racist ideas. Land’s influence on e/acc matters not just because it reveals its far-right ­antecedent,­ but because, depending on how you interpret his writing, Land is, at best, unconcerned with humanity; at worst, he despises it and cheers its demise.

In the past six years, prominent tech and venture capital leaders – including the hedge fund manager William Oberndorf, the billionaire investor Michael Moritz, the cryptocurrency booster Chris Larsen, the PayPal co-founder David Sacks, the Y Combinator CEO, Garry Tan, and the Pantheon CEO, Zachary Rosen – have invested millions into reshaping San Francisco’s policies. Because not all of their donations are publicly disclosed, the sum of their contributions is unknown but Tan and fellow tech barons have promised to invest up to $15 million in local races. To achieve those goals, they have created a loose network of interlocking non-profits, dark money groups and political action committees – a framework colloquially known as a “grey money” network – that allows them to obscure the true scale of their involvement in San Francisco’s municipal politics. Big tech-funded groups are rallying support for a slate of anti-progressive candidates who promise swift action to solve crime, homelessness, and drug addiction. They frame their politics as “moderate,” but the terms “reactionary” and “right-wing” fit much better. Their policy wish list reads like a Republican platform:

• More police funding (along with a repeal of police reform and criminal justice reform);

• Return to the “war on drugs” (with an emphasis on jailing homeless drug users);

• Rejection of harm reduction strategies like overdose prevention (in a city where 806 people died of overdoses last year);

• Expansion of mass video surveillance (funded and controlled by the big tech).

Of course it’s nothing but propaganda, crime rates and overdose rates are generally higher in Republican-led states with harshly punitive policies. We all know the fiasco that has been Musk’s purchase of Twitter, with reportedly three quarters of company value lost, but Musk didn’t buy Twitter to make money, as Tan says, the “goal was to replace an existing institution with a parallel version. Getting a parallel media was a key piece, and it wasn’t through voting. It was done by building.… We need to replace the unelected parts of the system as well, building parallel education, nonprofits, media, unions. That’s a possible recipe for reforming San Francisco and building the alternative tech political machine. And if it works in [San Francisco], it will work everywhere.”

Here’s potentially a more sinister angle. California Forever aligns suspiciously with a cultish dystopian movement to build so-called “network states”—private zones where tech zillionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private micro governments. The secret plot to assemble vast swaths of land and build a new city fits a pattern of wealthy Silicon Valley types attempting to construct similar enclaves around the globe. San Francisco billionaire Michael Moritz, a driving force behind California Forever, appeared to hint at the idea in his pitch to potential investors back in 2017. “He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought,” reported The New York Times, which first revealed the billionaires’ plan. What does it mean to rethink “new forms of governance”?

In a new book called Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, historian Quinn Slobodian chronicles the efforts of billionaires to create “alternative political arrangements at a small scale” through “acts of secession and fragmentation, carving out liberated territory within and beyond nations. We can secede by removing children from state-run schools, converting currency into gold or cryptocurrency, relocating to states with lower taxes, obtaining a second passport, or expatriating to a tax haven,” writes Slobodian. “We can secede, and many have, by joining gated communities to create private governments in miniature.”

I digressed too much.

To be clear, Microsoft and Google are of course driven by the profits. They expect the AI systems being developed by OpenAI and DeepMind to significantly boost shareholder value. But the profit motive is really the key.

In a lengthy Twitter thread, former Reddit CEO, Yishan, argues that the danger is not in whether Gemini or even Google is woke or not, but that the result from a clear instructions to LLMs were completely unexpected.

I am not sure whether I agree with Yishan regarding the expectation factor, but to me the key was not how “bonkers” the results were but WHY it has happened.

The why is directly related to TESCERAL and e/acc - it’s the combination of the ever-growing greed and the belief that all profit must be invested back into technology as it is the only way to save the humanity. It all sounds great, but it also reminded me of a story I recently read on Twitter:

“Google actually has a fascinating process for deciding which products or services to sunset. Every June, they make a list of all the org units in the company and write the name of each on a piece of paper, then they put them in a box in Sundar's office and draw to see which org unit will be affected. Then within the org unit, they prepare a piece of paper for each product, but only one has a black mark. The product leads then draw one-by-one until someone draws the paper with the black mark. Whoever drew the black mark, their product gets shut down and the team disbanded. They actually have a saying that Sundar reads before the whole process even starts: "Lottery in June, Q3 revenue to the moon."

I don’t know if that story is true, perhaps someone with knowledge of this things will comment on the essay, but if it is, it would not surprise me in the least. Most tech companies, especially the industry giants are successful in spite of their resources and abilities not because of them. Product design and development methodologies have self-corrupted into a conglomerate of acronyms with little meaning besides the official decorum. The revolutionary arrival of agile about thirty years ago seems like a mythological event as it was quickly adopted to continue the age-old dream of Winston W. Royce and his predecessors.

McKinsey and Co, recently published a paper claiming that they can measure developer productivity. Dan North does an amazing job responding to the usual corporate drivel from McKinsey, but I want to highlight two points claimed to be low value by McKinsey’s hacks:

• Managing test data

• Infrastructure work

How does one have expectations of quality if infrastructure and test data management are deprioritize in the name of productivity or yet another corporate platitude de jour. All in the name of greed and consumption - software companies do not spend or even pretend to allocate enough time to properly design, develop, test and deliver their products in the name of getting the product to market on a certain date. To make matters worse, there’s an entire industry of leeches focused solely on promoting new flavors of the same regurgitated methodology, trying to one-up each other and spurning every organization into an endless cycle of reorganizations, pivoting, shifting-left, whereas the only tangible result is jobs lost.

Over the last four decades, according to QSM, the average time from requirements to delivery decreased more than twice from 16 weeks to just over 7.25 weeks.

An argument can be made that technology and other factors were key in driving down the time from requirement to delivery, however, at the same time, the laughingly low percentage of time spent on maintenance (e.g. resolving your technical debt), decreased more than twice as well, from measly 2.6% of all development time to slightly more than 1% now.

In other words, we, generally, design, develop and ship software and hardware twice as fast as forty years ago and at the same time we allocate slightly more than 1% of effort to quality!! No wonder we get product launches like Apple Maps, Google Glass, Lululemon Astro Pants, Meta Horizon Worlds, Samsung Galaxy Note 7, and Google Gemini….

Yet, if one to peruse Google’s graveyard, tech giants either rarely learn from their mistakes or simply do not give a shit as long as revenues and stock are up.

Here’s these two headlines from earlier this months that were 45 minutes apart:

• Meta lays off thousands of employees

• Meta authorizes $50B in stock buybacks

  

Absurd Reckless Greed. The very same greed that leads the same big tech companies in the midst of the record-breaking economy and record-breaking profits to layoff thousands of employees (262,735 employees laid off in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi).

The given reasons were all referencing the supposed economic slowdown: fears of a recession and decreased investor confidence. Granted, Amazon’s revenue increased by $52 billion from 2022 to 2023, which did not stop them from laying off over 28,000 employees. Alphabet’s revenue grew about $25 billion year over year, yet they laid off 12,000 employees. Microsoft’s revenue rose $15.5 billion3, but that did not save over 12,000 employees.

Reminder, most people think that the economy is getting worse:

Which is not surprising in the least. Mark Copelovitch has been tracking the imbalance in media coverage related to economy, it’s truly astounding when presented like this:

One can argue that the tone has shifted, but the framing through the lenses of inflation/recession still shapes public opinion. And the near total lack of coverage of the unprecedented recovery is shocking. It’s not only that the job market has been tremendous

but even real wages, specifically for non-managerial workers, have risen above pre-pandemic levels:

I’ve mentioned before that the inflation we’ve seen in the global economy, aside from the pandemic, is largely the result of billionaires doing their best to monopolize markets and gouge us. So, of course, at the very same time the party of Lincoln and Reagan is actively trying to establish legal child labor across the nation, while Amazon and Trader Joe join SpaceX’s lawsuit arguing that the NLRB and the NLRA violate the separation of powers clause of the Constitution and are therefore unconstitutional.

Once you account for the blow that Bush and Trump tax cuts delivered to our revenue growth

it all starts to come into focus - from the slow-paced erosion of the established economic norms that started with the trickle-down economics, to the wide-spread rampant assault on labor laws and worker rights, to the growth of TESCERAL and the rise of California Forever dystopian city states, to, well Gemini AI’s Vikings:

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI could alter the way people view themselves and degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human. He is also concerned with the potential concentration of power in the hands of those who control AI. Harari believes that the potential for AI to hack the operating system of human civilization forces us to reexamine our relationship with technology and our understanding of what it means to be human, because I sure hope it’s not this: