Huh, I wonder where all the “keep politics out of technology” people are on this one.
I wonder if they even realize this is politics.
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“Politics” refers to the processes and activities that groups of people use to make shared decisions about the distribution of power and resources.
When a company prioritizes a specific political party, that’s politics. When a company chooses to harm or to protect a specific subgroup of society, that’s politics. When a company decides to fund or eschew a specific technology, that’s politics.
And when an multibillion dollar AI vendor decides to give their technology free reign to plagiarize people’s work en masse and scramble entire job markets, but then decides to crack down on that technology when it infringes on •company’s• work and scrambles •product• markets…that too is politics.
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This is why discussions of AI as a technology cannot be separated from •who• is behind the technology: who makes it, who controls it, who profits from it, who gains power from it.
There is no “just stick to the technical capabilities and leave politics out of it” when the •actual technical capabilities• are directly formed by human power struggles outside of technology.
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…and technical capabilities are •always• formed by such power struggles among humans. Technology is not something that arrives from an alien spaceship or that congeals spontaneously from the alternate dimension of pure abstract ideas. Technology is made by humans for humans.
By •which• humans? For •which• humans?
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Miss those questions and you’ve missed the whole story. If you’re not thinking about that, you’re just a tool of the people who are.
Because I •guarantee• that the people who’ve accumulated enough power and resources to exert large-scale influence over the shape of technology understand •perfectly well• that they are shaping human society’s shared decisions about the distribution of power and resources.
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@inthehands As Ruha Benjamin said, technology always ships the culture of its makers.
@inthehands
Technology is the application of science to obtain a result
Politics are attempts to achieve a result that involve or affect more than one person
If you're doing technology with people, you are doing politics
This has been my impression of the Free Software/FOSS movements for quite some time -- that the movements themselves are centered around politics, around who is allowed to own their computers, who is allowed to own their software, and who is allowed to take part. The movement is intrinsically political, just as corporations and their restrictions are.
'Politics' pervades every aspect of our lives. Anyone saying 'you don't want to get into politics' is a bald-faced lie, they just don't want to get into one aspect of peoples' lives that makes them uncomfortable because they're not convinced they'll be on the side of the angels.
AI companies: Our stuff is so cool! It lets you be an expert in everything!
Users: *reclaim their software and liberate their hardware*
AI companies: Wait, no! Not like that!
@inthehands People will never learn that software that can be relied upon to keep working for you is not to be found in "the cloud". Never.