Re: <nettime> Maciej Ceglowski: "Machine learning is like money laundering

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

There is a heavy bias here under the assumption that "we" exists and has 
common interests. This is not true.

There is a straightforward class division here.

This (the last 20-30 years) is the first time in the history that hi-IQ 
people with abstract thinking skills compose the *dominant* fraction of 
the workforce maintaining the power apparatus, due to automation and 
activities related to it. Clever people were always needed to maintain 
the power, but they used to be a tiny fraction of the total 
power-sustaining workforce, while the majority were 
blue-collar/thugs-with-guns labor kind. This has changed, and the said 
new workforce has all prerequisites - numbers, common economic 
interests, marriages, shared education and media - for morphing from a 
guild into the class. It's not 1%, but more like 4-5% (the slogan needs 
to change to "We are the 95%".)

As any class, they take care of their own interests - homeless/poor are 
not in that set. They are doing quite well, and the 'problems' discussed 
in the text are not their problems, so it's pointless to expect them to 
'solve' those. If you think that fascism operated by thugs with few 
advisors was bad, wait to see how it feels when it's operated by the 
whole class.


> The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically
> accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it. Just
> like we don't let countries build reactors that produce plutonium, no
> matter how sincere their promises not to misuse it, we should not allow
> people to create and indefinitely store databases of personal
> information. The risks are too high.
>
> I think a workable compromise will be to allow all kinds of
> surveillance, but limit what anyone is allowed to store or sell.
>
> More broadly, we have to stop treating computer technology as something
> unprecedented in human history. Not every year is Year Zero. This is not
> the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the
> rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a
> rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought
> those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

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