A neural network comes out of the top of an ivory tower, above a crowd of people's heads (shown in green to symbolise grass roots). Some of them are reaching up to try and take some control and pull the net down to them. Watercolour illustration.

As a fully paid-up member of the Audrey Watters fan club, I make no apologies for including another one of her articles in Thought Shrapnel this week. This one has much that I could dwell on, but I’m trying not to post too much about the current digital overthrow of democracy in the US at the moment.

One could also say that I could stop posting as much about AI, but then that’s all my information feeds are full of at the moment. And, anyway, it’s an interesting topic.

While you should absolutely go and read the full text, I pulled the following out of Audrey’s post, which references something that I’ve also referenced Venkatesh Rao discuss: being above or below the “API line”. These days, it’s more like an “AI line”

In 2015, an essay made the rounds (in my household at least) that argued that jobs could be classified as above or below the “API line” – above the API, you wield control, programmatically; below, however, your job is under threat of automation, your livelihood increasingly precarious. Today, a decade later, I think we’d frame this line as an “AI” not an “API line” (much to Kin’s chagrin). We’re all told – and not just programmers – that we have to cede control to AI (to “agents” and “chatbots”) in order to have any chance to stay above it. The promise isn’t that our work will be less precarious, of course; there’s been no substantive, structural shift in power, and if anything, precarity has gotten worse. AI usage is merely a psychological cushion – we’ll feel better if we can feel faster and more efficient; we’ll feel better if we can think less.

We’re all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men. And they truly fucking hate us.

It’s a line, it’s always a line with them: those above, and those below. “AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches,” writes Eryk Salvaggio in “A Fork in the Road.” Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, has always been a technology of ranking and sorting and discriminating. It has always been a technology of eugenics.

Source: Second Breakfast

Image: CC-BY Jamillah Knowles & We and AI / Better Images of AI / People and Ivory Tower AI