How A.I. is Driving Policy | Paul Schütze

A.I. is here-except it isn't. Or is it?
A.I. is all over the news all of the time, and nations are scrambling to win the race and become the world leaders in this technology which we're told will change the world. This belief, this myth, is driving policy, investment, hype and conferences. It's the myth that is making A.I., a technology which has consistenly been over-promised and failed to deliver.
Yet, nobody is asking if we want the changes we're told A.I. will deliver. The assumption is the future will be artificially intelligent. This means that other critical problems are falling off the agenda which is now dominated by the race towards a hyper-technological future-no matter the costs. Researcher Paul Schütze joins me to explore how these myths are making A.I. into a reality, with no consideration as to whether or not we want that reality. He explains the cost to the environment, social cohesion, and even our imagination.
🔴 Paul's work: paulschuetze.de/
🔴 The impacts of AI futurism: an unfiltered look at AI's true effects on the climate crisis: link.springer.com/article/10....
🔴 Rethinking Racial Capitalism: rowman.com/ISBN/9781783488858...
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🌎 Twitter: / crisisreports

[@TennesseeJed]

The same magic that brought us surplus is the same magic that is killing everything we value.

[@garrenosborne9623]

Thats a great quote, i'll put it on a fast T'shirt. But seriously its a nice sentence to unpack.... as theres still alot of magical thinking behind faith in tec, without addressing who uses it. Also surplus we have today is despite what we could have - if hording profit & rival sabotage aspect of competition {negative competition} wasnt one of the deep fundamentals holding us back.

[@TennesseeJed]

@@garrenosborne9623 I find it interesting how we give credit to ourselves and our systems for increasing the human enterprise when, in fact, it was the hydrocarbon energy discovery. Humans, like other animals, were existing on contemporary energy flows when we found hundreds of millions of years of stored sunshine atomically compressed into useable stable hydrogen. The correlation of the rise of fascism in the early 20th century after we develop machinery to use that energy is also suspicious to me.

[@MattAngiono]

​@@TennesseeJed well, society is run by psychopaths. And somehow, we continue to let them fool us into accepting their legitimacy

[@garyhoover9750]

@@TennesseeJed I agree very much. MOdernity is Fossil Fool culture. Our theology is “Fossil Fool theology”. Our atheism is “Fossil Fool Atheism” and the same goes for psychology and sociology and even the so-called “hard sciences”. Modernity is now the most powerful self-terminating machine humans have yet built. Civilization has long been ecocidal - thriving by killing off the life around it. But we have expanded that core characteristic of civilization without even examining that characteristic. Schmachtenberger’s idea of a “multi-polar trap” fits very well here also, I think. What we call “science” is mostly not science at all - it is intellectual product designed to maximize profit. Ultimately “science” is caged in such a way qas to weponize every aspect of human exisence in order to centralize wealth and power. So why do we fight? An ancient book says that we fight because we do not have what we want. When we covet, we steal. When we steal, we kill. We tell ourselves other stories - religious or secular - that allow us to pretend that we are building a world when we are simply destroying the living world and ourselves within it. Drunk on ancient sunlight, we have become Fossil Fools. Love deeply, live gently, and let go gracefully

[@TennesseeJed]

@@garyhoover9750 locust are grasshoppers gone wild with abundance, and that doesn't end well. Your comments are astute! Thanks for the discussion!

[@daveferger9947]

Human optimization: Joint replacement surgery is very illustrative of class. When a C-suiter gets a shoulder replacement it's to maintain their stroke on the golf course or tennis court. When the worker on an assembly line gets a shoulder replacement it's to maintain their income and maybe make it to retirement. And just like AI it's celebrated as a boon for all.

[@megacancer3426]

You have to wonder if all of the new digital tech will open new vistas of available energy or compete with humans for what is available. I believe it is already eating more than it's bringing to the table.

[@MattAngiono]

It's just the logic of capitalism brought to new levels with digital tech. So long as profit is the driver, the technology will accelerate the collapse. It's truly sad, because it could be used to solve so many problems on the global scale, but not while it's based on psychotic logic

[@gabri41200]

Basically, we should de-industrilize, put more people in the fields and less in the cities. Use less machinery, less transportation. Focus on local communities. Focus the industries remaining in things like health and space defense (from asteroids). Abolish social media.

[@meabandit5637]

If a species facing these consequences did what you suggest, then it would be considered an intelligent species. A species incapable of making such choices is left to the fate of natural forces like the Maximum Power Principle.

[@astrologerclimatewitness3787]

Bingo!!.You sound like me...

[@justcollapse5343]

Kudos to you Rachel. This podcast has really come a long way and grown, and it has been a journey worth taking. Your understanding across the broad range of intersecting and interrelated crises is greatly appreciated. It has been suggested to us at JustCollapse by some of your subscribers, that Associate Professor Booth of Critical Collapse Studies, and socio-ecological activist, Tristan Sykes, might make for useful contributions regarding the limitations of politics and action, the limitations of science and academia, and the reality of our complex and intractable predicament.

[@andreasvox8068]

If technology could solve our problems, humanity wouldn't have any problems any more.

[@astrologerclimatewitness3787]

Bingo!!

[@Jon-hg5lz]

How ironic that someone concerned with sustainability berates ppl for being concerned with long term outcomes.

[@TheFlyingBrain.]

The fear of death is more pervasive and influential at the core of every aspect of the metacrisis than we realize. Far more than we are currently willing to consider, much less acknowledge and discuss. We meed @ more prominent and continuing global discussion about the healthy acceptance of mortality.

[@philip_hofmaenner47]

Just look at the last Nvidia Keynote Event and you will see where their true interests lay. There was like 2 minutes about how AI and their earth simulator could help fighting climate change and the rest of the 2 hours was mostly about how they want to help companies with new solutions to replace us (expensive humans) with AI assistants and robots...

[@carultch]

Jensen Huang just wants to open Pandora's box to find another billion dollars inside. He doesn't care what problems he creates.

[@Nhoj737]

No ‘BAU’? ‘Most’ ‘economic thinking’ is ‘short run’ and ‘redundant’? ‘It’ ignores the ‘supply side’? ‘Growth’ {and ‘civilisation’} depends upon ‘cheap’ F.F. - those so called ‘halcyon days’ are ‘over’. ? “The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders - at least within the western empire - have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.” ? “The problem with both visions of the future - and the spectrum of views between them - is a fundamental misunderstanding of the collapse which has begun to break over us. This is that each assumes the continuation of that part of industrial civilisation which is required to make their version of the future possible, even as the coming collapse wipes away ALL aspects of industrial civilisation. Most obviously, nobody had developed even an embryonic version of the renewable energy supply chain which is the essential first step to turning non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) into the envisioned “renewables” upon which the promised techno-psychotic future is to be built. That is, until it is possible to mine the minerals, build the components, manufacture and transport the technologies without the use of fossil fuels at any stage in the process, then there is no such thing as “renewable energy” in the sense which the term is currently promoted. “

[@sinterior2626]

Nailed it.

[@postholocene]

this is the good shit. i'll add that such a renewable production loop, if even achievable, is not something that will ever be incentivized within capitalist social relations. furthermore even a new high density energy source that could actually replace 17+ twh of FF would merely continue to overload the biosphere with waste heat. cuz the heat is just entropic production from our exergetic dissipation, the 'greenhouse effect' from fossil fuels specifically is just a multiplier effect on thermal overshoot. we'd be cookin anyways even if all of our energy was "green", just maybe a bit slower.

[@postholocene]

which is to say, the only way out is way, way, less. of everything. including people.

[@sinterior2626]

@@postholocene the end of the fossil fuel age, was never going to end well.

[@guapochino140]

@@sinterior2626 Who wants to stay after the party to do the cleanup? Sounds like hard work and responsibility!

[@bingxilao9086]

The planet-Critical intro is so smoothly delivered it made me wonder if it was AI, if a voice AI yet exists which can deliver a minor amount of natural inflection and emotion. (first time viewing channel).

[@leightonwatkins9486]

Snakes eating it’s own tail...

[@j85grim4]

No video?

[@robertbollen]

As to the influence the tech community has over policy making, I expect TBI will be involved in promoting tech, so would be worth finding someone knowledgeable about the institute to interview.

[@carolinebza]

Emil P Torres and TESCREAL would be a fascinating episode...

[@mpetry912]

fantastic topic, thanks for taking this one on

[@davidwilkie9551]

Totally agree, and like other Rachel videos, would assume that the topic is ploughing old ground in a refreshed context. Good enough.

[@o_o8203]

22:00 If you're not a nerd like me, look up what a "palantir" is and how they were used in LOTR. Basically they are seeing stones used by Sauron to control the rulers of Middle Earth 🙃

[@Bencee116]

I don't believe the techbro conversation around AI is as simplistic as seeing technology as a "saviour". This view certainly exists, but even in Silicon Valley a big part of the "tech-bros" narrative is that we should somehow try to slow down the development of AI because a big percentage of people are sceptical whether AI will be a net force for good/controllable, etc. A lot of nuanced conversations are going on there, one of that is how to slow down "progress" and innovation at all, and how realistic it is given current incentive structures and geopolitics.

[@3pix]

Universal Basic Income is a start. After, we hopefully can ease down, to do more, better R&D and begin arguing based on experiences w/o hysteria.

[@itheuserfirst3186]

He's whistling past the graveyard. 😄

[@patallen229]

Starting out with begging for clicks is a real turn off

[@0MVR_0]

nobody wanted you to be turned on

[@GerryNottingham]

Boo hoo.

[@SleepyMatt-zzz]

Literally what everyone does nowadays.

[@forgetful3360]

I keep coming back here because of the quality of many of the guests and in the hope that the quality of the interviewing has improved. Alas, once again I leave thinking the host has not given the guest's work more than a cursory glance. Too much pop analysis/commentary from the host. What do good hosts do: read the material, formulate brief questions, sit back and listen.

[@clarkdavis5333]

The only crisis is us.

[@MattAngiono]

Depends what you mean by us

[@andreasvox8068]

@@MattAngiono Humans. As Douglas Adams put it: "This planet's problem was, that most of the people living on it were unhappy for most of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small pieces of green paper, which is odd because on the whole it was not the small pieces of paper that were unhappy."

[@MattAngiono]

@andreasvox8068 I don't think it's humans in general. You can look at a variety of ancient native cultures that enhanced their landscape and lived in great harmony with the ecosystem. Humans, when properly aligned, can do great things for the planet. The issue is our system. It's based on competition, consumption, growth, extraction, and exploitation. None of these, without proper limitations and negative feedbacks, lead to any sort of harmonious interaction with our environment. Change the system, and human beings will find a way to thrive without killing everything else. Part of the issue, however, is that human beings also resist change and have become so stratified in our thinking that it will be a wonder if we resolve this. So yes, I'd say we're in a meta crisis, we don't have an obvious way out, and will likely destroy everything. Not because we're human, but because we found ourselves in a psychopathic system and didn't know how to stop the machine

[@andreasvox8068]

@@MattAngiono Maybe we should just stop moving little pieces of green paper. That would change the system.

[@DalbyJoakim]

@@MattAngionoTrue and clear! If we could flip feedbacks back into the direction of householding and sharing commons instead of hoarding and wasting, we would live well instead of spreading death.

[@Natty183]

Algorithms are controlling the rental market. The FBI has raided some of the culprits. So far this tech has caused a lot of suffering and homelessness. Doing great! Love what we've done with this place.

[@firstnamesurname6550]

Uncanny valley bots or humans?

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

60 Minutes just did a story on the environmental impacts of AI (and crypto) - and it was a greenwashing story of how AI will save as much energy as it spends and AI is inherently good otherwise unless it gets out of control. hahaha

[@sparksmacoy]

All aboard the AI hype train to utopia...toot! toot!

[@WmJames-rx8go]

I do believe the concepts you are covering are valid and worth debating, however, it is one thing to take a position and debate in its favor and it is another thing to believe in that position. While there is always an element of truth in the things being said here there is also a complete misunderstanding of economics and the history of the human race, and, or, a complete misalignment in actual life experience and the suffering that people have endured throughout the ages, that would allow people to take the positions you have and actually believe them. To not believe in the resurrection of the dead is to deny over 1 billion Christians there most cherished belief. Shame! I can also assume that you actually do not have a relationship with mathematics and the concept of rates. Many people believe that we are developing AI so that these machines will eventually be able to increase the rate at which positive events happen in our society and to provide a floor of highly distributed and valuable knowledge for future generations in the event of some cataclysmic event that forces mankind to its knees again, as it has in the past. One more point, yes the declining world population is not exactly a world ending problem at this point and will not be for some years to come however if it were to happen again in the next generation it would probably lead to a complete decay of civilization for many thousands of years. I can assure you if you had to live in that kind of environment you would not be a happy person! I bet neither one of you have ever actually had a really, really, really hard job. I have, and I can tell you this, when everything hurts all the time and you still don't have any money for your efforts you begin to realize what is valuable and what is not valuable, especially as it relates to opinions.