You Know Stuff
You're already wise enough to be loud about AI...
Artificial Intelligence is confusing.
As a term it’s often meaningless. In the popular imagination it’s come to represent everything from deep Machine Learning applications to toothbrushes with delusions of grandeur. It’s slop images and writing, oppressive surveillance systems12, the bastard machinery behind rejected benefits claims345 and the thumbs up for suicidal youth67. It’s also none of those things, depending on your point of view and what customer base you fancy aiming at.
As a technology it’s a heady mixture of hype, mundane applications, fantastical promises and grimly predictable impositions - largely wrapped up in a nice, inscrutable black box. Which means that it is - alongside many other things under the vagaries of neoliberalism - something you don’t need to understand, you just need to trust that other, more important people do.
You can see the manifestations of that assumed (and profitable) ignorance on all sides of the AI debates. Gleeful exponents often make up whatever narrative they like around the idea of AI because hey, why not? It’s a daydreamers technology and those who are assumed to be important enough to truly be at grips with it are usually more than happy to nod along and smile at almost anything so long as it keeps the money flowing.
Would be fierce critics see the same confusion around the technology and its narratives and, all too often, recoil. Where the dreamers allow the gaps in their knowledge to flourish into wondrous intelligences, pandering chatbots and submissive lovers the cynics let it silence them.
It’s a complex technology, you wouldn’t understand it, you’re a left behind Luddite.
You haven’t used it enough, if you had you’d understand.
Soon it could do this, you don’t know what’s possible.
It’s inevitable, you just aren’t smart or imaginative enough to understand that.
It can be a challenge to step into criticism against such widespread and cheerful speculation. It’s easier by far to assume that the absence of knowledge - technological, social, philosophical - means you really don’t understand what AI is all about. Maybe it is the miracle cure but cynical old you is too beaten down to see it. Maybe it’s inevitable either way - plenty of bosses, politicians, journos and assorted hacks will assure you of that - so why express the discomfort and uncertainty it draws out from you? After all, what are you going to do, learn to program your own AI? Dissect the mysteries of the black box? Pick up a Masters degree in computer science? Probably not and, even if you have any of those things it doesn’t necessarily mean the audience can’t just dodge into other realms of idle speculation (so what if you’ve learnt the science, you still haven’t seen my fantasy).
Chances are that, confronted with the hype and declared ownership of the future that comes with it you’ll just retire to keeping your own counsel. Perhaps the hype fiends don’t know either (they mostly don’t) but the loudhailer is theirs for now, so why scream into the storm?
Because you’re you, that’s why.
The most vivid dream of the biggest AI hype merchants is to displace the human from humanity. The Generative AI types want to make the arts a wish fulfilment system, forgetting the craft of human expression and creation in favour of a glorified search bar where ‘I want’ is immediately rewarded with slop. A barren diet in itself but, on the plus side, there is an endless supply.
In education the absence of the human support - often a result of capitalism’s eager austerity - leaves a gap for the inhuman to be imposed. Learning by metric, learning by task, learning to do gig work without ever learning much of any human value. An erosion of critical thought and interpersonal experience that happily silences the challenges which are hard enough to pose already.
With predictive AI the desire is to perfect the decision making process, reduce the messy uncertainties of human engagement with the enshrined and unknowable wisdom of the black box. Well, an erasure of uncertainties and human engagement at least as far as those important people frame it whilst retaining their positions.
But you’re you. You know things, you experience things, you are alive and vital and wise in the ways of your own existence. You may never understand Artificial Intelligence, you may never even be able to glean from amidst the mountains of fluff and fantasy what it’s even supposed to be, but you are an absolute expert on your own existence. You know your work, your community, your craft, your art, your area, your desires and your fears. You know what brings value to these things, you know what can be gleaned from the processes of being alive and what must be endured. You know where you need control and agency, you know where the human isn’t just the generator of an end product but the essential process that makes that final output worth having.
As an artist you know the value of your work, as a teacher you know the value of your subject and the myriad experiences that craft a student in the learning of it, as a student you know what ideas spark you and how they’re communicated, as a person walking down the street you know that you want to be the decision maker, you know that your community should be yours to shape… You know stuff.
The AI hype machine lets a little knowledge from a minority of technicians, researchers, scientists and thinkers fuel a vast ocean of fantasy indulged by those eager for the delusion. Those of us on the receiving end, those who are critical of the daydreams, we offer the opposite. Amongst me, you, we and us there’s a vast, vast well of embodied knowledge, awareness, understanding and information. We know what and who we are and you don’t need to understand the contents of the black box of technology to express those things. So don’t worry about speaking out of ignorance of AI, nobody else really does - focus on speaking out of understanding of the human experience, it’s a lot more meaningful.
Couldn't agree more, this piece perfectly dissects the confusing black box of AI, highlighting why explainability is crucial for evryone, not just the 'important' ones.