Out of Touch

I was just reading this op-ed in the New York Times by Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu, discussing how Silicon Valley is growing out of touch with the realities of everyday Americans, focused on the AI wars and what people actually need right now. 

Firstly, growing out of touch? Baby, the valley has been out of touch. It’s practically a point of pride. That’s the brand. And I know because I’m here, and I’ve been around long enough to see this boom and bust cycle a few times.

I’ve been saying for a while: No one is actually asking for AI to be jammed into every fucking thing they touch, but don’t let that stop the folks at the top from spending billions and billions of dollars to beat each other to the punch on… Whatever.

Meanwhile, they are roasting our environment, especially around communities of color and areas of deprivation, to build data centers that suck up the water and pollute the air around them. As is traditional for robber barons.

Those guys at the top? Appalling. Financing fascism. Sucking up to a wannabe dictator in hopes of relaxed regulation. They are in competition with each other to make the biggest bucks, with no regard for the impact on everyone else’s lives, which is exactly in keeping with what they’ve given us up to now. We’re talking about people that knowingly create products that ensnare children in depression and also approve of chatbots that sexualize them. Where they work in the physical, they exploit their labor forces in hot warehouses with hard labor before replacing them with robots. They build themselves private compounds and exclusive schools for their children while they fund the demolishing of public schools and the sale of public lands. They operate with impunity like comic book villains.

These are not anyone’s saviors, and waiting around for them to build technology for the social good is absolutely a fool’s errand. Silicon Valley is high on its own farts, again, and we are all supposed to believe that this hype means that a techno-utopia is just on the other side. And that is never, never what happens, though they need us to buy into it to line their pockets and pave the way.

So many people are guzzling this freely-provided Kool-Aid, volunteering to be the guinea pigs of this technology, even as we see people suffering from mental health crises and even death because they were sucked in. Again, history is full of this, and the net effect is that the rich get richer and the rest of us struggle to hold onto to what we have. 

The cotton gin didn’t end slavery, it entrenched dependence on enslaved black labor. We always get sold a false bill of goods about technology, only to come thudding down to a status quo where income inequalities are entrenched, and the ones that got the special treatment to build their uncontrolled outcomes get astronomically wealthier. Does anyone really believe that this generation of ruthlessly self-enriching, super-wealthy white men will deliver an outcome different than what’s come before?

Let me talk about the effects of this that I can already see:

- I’m writing less. I don’t want my words used to train the plagiarism machine, and I can’t see any way around it while sharing my work. So, I don’t. I can hardly be the only person disinclined to do their art under this shadow. 

- After years of enjoying the connection of social media, my disgust with Zuckerberg has led me to massively curtail posting anything personal. I don’t want my words used in chatbot training, and I don’t want my kids’ faces being fed into whatever sinister shit he cooks up next. Honestly, I look back on the beautiful timelines assembled, the hopeful stories of life and love that I shared, and it makes me sad that I don’t feel comfortable doing that anymore.

- People smart enough to know better say, “I asked ChatGPT…” with numbing regularity. Friend, that thing is not more intelligent than you, it’s not an expert in anything, and it is not a data tool. Everything you said after that, I skipped. I zoned out. Tell me about your fever dreams, as they have more credence than the people-pleasing delusions of this thing that is just regurgitating plausible word combos. 

- Jobs are being automated, but quality is not improving. People are just not able to compete with a VC-funded fly-by-night robo-competitor that doesn’t have to eat or pay rent. 

- Disconnection is only accelerating, because these bots are acting as a cheap and addictive substitute for human connection, insult to injury after the societal reshuffle of COVID. More screen time that feels like a conversation but lacks a true conversational partner is a recipe for spiraling, and we’ve been here before with other technology. The lonely and vulnerable among us are already succumbing.

- Misinformation continues to spread, as these chatbots are regurgitating things with the tone of truthiness, but are also being visibly manipulated by their masters. And this is to say nothing of the flood of deepfakes delivering deception.

Zuckerberg’s vision for the near future is all of us siloed, having conversations with robots as a cure for loneliness, constantly available to pull data from and serve ads to. How quickly he forgets that his core product used to be saying connected to people you knew and loved from face-to-face interaction.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here communing with the spirit of William Morris, making something with my hands and teaching my children to do the same.