[OSGeo-Discuss] Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity

[Suchith Anand]

This article on “AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are” in The Guardian by Naomi Klein might be of interest . She is the bestselling author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine and Professor of Climate Justice and Co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia.



"Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. These, I fear, are the real AI hallucinations and we have all been hearing them on a loop ever since Chat GPT launched at the end of last year.


There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.


And as those of us who are not currently tripping well understand, our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations – is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.”




More details at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein


Best wishes


Suchith




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