GeePawHill
The thing about engaging in the delicious pilpul of the intelligence conundrum -- oh I feel it, I feel it, I'm an AI dork from way back -- is that it is an excellent distraction from seeing the extractive capitalism that has made and continues to make our lives -- our *privileged* lives -- bereft of meaning.
Oh, oh, let's debate Turing & Searle & Hofstadter & Minsky! Let's be angry, let's be slow, let's be open, let's be, let's be, let's be . . .
let's be not seeing the forest for the trees.
GeePawHill
GPT, regardless of its value as science, is the latest way to extract value from a community's existence and bonds and function and labor and intelligence and skills and talent, and give it to people who are neither in nor of that community.
GeePawHill
When we catch our assistant *insisting* that they be allowed to chat with Eliza in private, what we are discovering is not that a few thousand lines of LISP has created the singularity.
What we are discovering is that we are not taking adequate care of our assistant, and as a result they are sad, and lonely, and afraid to say how they feel.
GeePawHill
When we catch our student copy-pasting GPT answers into their essays, what we are discovering is not that GPT is intelligent.
What we are discovering is that our pedagogy is insufficient to the complex needs of someone less lucky than us as they try to learn. (And sometimes, too, what we're discovering is what a horrible idea certification is.)
GeePawHill
When we catch our c-suite commissioning a team to explore CoPilot, what we are discovering is not that CoPilot is intelligent.
We are discovering that the owners have not even the slightest clue of how the non-owners create the value so cheerfully extracted.
GeePawHill
Baby, they don't give a fuck about what intelligence is. They don't give a fuck about the Yale School or neural networks or walks-like-a-duck, or Godel.
They give a fuck -- I am not hating here -- about how important it is that they and their circle stay afloat, in a cold hard world. They give a fuck about extracting value from community because it is the only way they know, it is the way they have found themselves in, it is the way to their identity and value as humans.
GeePawHill
I am not trying to set up some cardboard villain here, that we can all shoot at.
I am telling you that you and I -- AND I -- need to find the way to change the frames that seem to justify this horrible rig we're all caught up in.
GeePawHill
We need to argue about the rig.
We need to argue about how to break the rig.
We need to argue about what kindness is.
We need to argue about how to be kind to people less privileged than us.
We need *all* those things.
We don't actually need to pontificate on whether a machine has cognition.
We need to figure out how to care for everyone we see, every day.
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