Re: <nettime> Please show some conscience

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

dear olia,

On Sat, 24 Mar 2018, olia lialina wrote:

> But leaving singularity and naive me aside... this change in jargon
> is more than a trend. Meaningless, inconsistent, but persistent
> substitute of computational terms, processes and products with "AI"
> is how IT industry is protecting themselves from
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation

I believe is not just a protective attitude if you consider it always
comes with a fanfare of "innovation" and "e-culture" and "cultural
industries" scams then is easy to realise these are aggressive
stances.

> and any other attempts to ask questions. AI noise is how silicon
> valley is working on alibi, getting ready to shift the blame for
> everything what goes wrong onto "emancipated machine intellect". I
> am sure we will here this argument in court.

After a few more desasters I agree this will all be debated in court
rather than in labs. In my recent publication I've dedicated a fair
amount of attention on the subject, connected to Caroline Nevejan's
studies on "trusthwortiness" when she wrote already in 2007:

 Information and Communication technologies facilitate a transcending
 of time and place by mediating presence and permit a different scale
 of tracking and tracing and a different scale in collecting and
 distributing of information and communication than natural presence
 facilitates. Doing so, information and communication technologies
 also facilitate the taking of a moral distance, because of the way
 presence is designed through these technologies.

This is where we need to let biopolitics back inside the room. This is
the path along which we can observe how violence is transferred by a
sort of biopolitical equation into a mechanic domain where the
responsibility is not anymore a moral question for humans.

Algorithms and their buzzword alibis (AI, blockchain, IoT, etc.) are
serving a mediation of moral principles connected to the teological /
philosophical role that pre-determination had in history - or if you
like a more materialistic approach here they are simply adopted to
mediate violence.

I am not surprised many policy makers today are desperately calling
for "social good" uses of such "innovations", but I'm afraid such
reformist efforts may be wasted until we see a significant investment
for a sort of "Fletcher Memorial Home" (cit. Pink Floyd) where to host
Silicon Valley's computational ideologists in an environment where
they cannot harm others. Perhaps we shall call it a "sandbox".

ciao

-- 
  Denis Roio a.k.a. Jaromil  http://Dyne.org think &do tank
  Ph.D, CTO & co-founder    software to empower communities
Book keynotes, lectures, workshops: https://jaromil.dyne.org
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