The fault is not in our technologies, it is in ourselves. (With apologies to Will Shakespeare.) Just now I was listening to "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys," and things momentarily jelled for me, reality was momentarily clear. The things I want to say suddenly became possible to say, which is often hard in my crowded and addled mind.
Nothing new here. I've seen others make the same point over and over. Some days though I feel it more forcefully than others. Technology has no agency that we, our corporations, our governments, do not grant it. We may feel that we have little enough in our lives. As David Runciman writes (in The Handover), we have given up much of our agency to corporations and governments, even to markets, to make our lives longer, safer, more comfortable. It is what allows our world to function to the extent it does.
We live in a time of rage over the loss of agency without any clear way to reclaim it. We may rail at governments over this. We are too enamored of wealth and markets, too brainwashed by economists and their fellow travelers to really blame the corporations or the people who lead them. Those who do just follow other economic dogmas and cannot break free. Economics is our real religion after all - the Market our Moloch.
Our impotent fury must be channeled elsewhere. For a few decades we focused on government, but it can only absorb so much and cannot keep going much longer with the hatred and loathing the extremes of our political spectrum heap on it. Technology is the convenient target now. Algorithms have been given too much power by the state, by the corporations, by the wealthy already. With the hype-driven rise of LLMs, we seem to have the perfect target. We are far from AGI. We may never even see it or even an AI worthy of the name. The stupidity and avarice of the powerful, never content with their share of the Market, itself an illusion we have created to rule over us - One Market to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.(Sorry JRR, I'm really riffing on famous quotes tonight.)
The driving factor for so many is the plausible increase in efficiency, in productivity, in profit. They are chasing illusions. We have to teach ourselves a different way of thinking and being. We can use LLMs, or we can be used by them, and by the people behind them. It is important to understand both the machines and its overlords, though even they may believe they are in thrall to their bots. The same is true with all of our other hardware and software.
In Frank Herbert's universe, the Orange Catholic Bible enjoined: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." (One quote I am not screwing with tonight.) We need to realize that we make our machines out of steel or silicon, but out of ideas, people, organization, as I should have known from my small acquaintance with Lewis Mumford (though it took many other writers over three decades, from Roseanne Stone, to Jeannette Winterson, to Amitav Ghosh, James Bridle, and David Runicman to make it real for me - I can be particularly obtuse about some things). There are many technologies in play now, some physical, some psychological, some sociological.
Only if we begin waking up to this can we begin to free ourselves, begin to make a more livable world for ourselves and for our fellow creatures.
Or we can keep going around, blundering into things, raging, deluding ourselves.
