Legible To Machines?

Here's another short post.  I have a Chinese friend who is a software engineer.  I think her husband may also be a software engineer.  Anyway, we have been having a friendly semi-disagreement about the capabilities and impact of AI on the future of industrial society.  (It's always a good thing to have friends who are willing to disagree with you!  This helps to keep your thoughts and conclusions healthy!  She also knows more about computers than I do...)  She sees AI as somewhat inevitable due to its rapidly increasing capabilities, although she recognizes some of the potential harms that may result from the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence (including large language models or LLM's) in society.

As one can tell from reading some of my most recent posts on precarity, I am a bit more skeptical about the ability of AI to take over a majority of human cognitive tasks.  And in re-reading (or in my case, re-hearing the audiobook version of) Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott, I've been wondering how much of the power of present-day AI is the result of our society having been remade in order to become more legible to AI.  Scott points out the many ways in which the ruling elites of past and present societies have remade their societies in order to make them legible to the command and control organs of the State, thus facilitating easier command and control of their subjects.  Yet these schemes of legibility have often had painfully unforeseen consequences.  How have major corporate interests made our society more legible?  How have their methods also facilitated making our society more legible to large AI deployments such as chatGPT and Gemini?  What are some of the consequences we are likely to see from this re-making and its resulting increased legibility?  I wish I could ask James C. Scott such questions, but unfortunately he passed away last year.  Looks like we'll have to figure things out ourselves...

Repost: Gantry Collapse

I must apologize for not writing a new post in a while.  Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are reaping the consequences of the curse that reads, "May you live in interesting times." This curse is commonly cited as originating in ancient China, but it was actually uttered for the first time by a British politician in the early 20th century.  (However, the Chinese do have the following deliciously appropriate phrase: 宁为太平犬，勿为乱人, which can be rendered, "Better to be a dog in peace than a man in chaos!")  

Anyway, the effort of dealing with national chaos (and its trickling down to the local level) has me quite busy, so I won't be writing a lengthy post in the near future.  However, I have been thinking about the current chaos as well as the architects of that chaos, namely Mr. Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  I am also thinking of one of the chief enablers of Trump, of the Far Right, and of Republicanism - namely, the white American evangelical/Protestant church and its subculture.  This is a church which claims to know Jesus, yet whose members hate their fellow human beings if those human beings are not American or white or rich or English-speaking, and whose leaders practice and tolerate the most egregious predatory sexual behavior - including felony-level sexual assault, pedophilia, and rape.  Reading the latest news about evangelical sex scandals and the culture which enables perpetrators to continue in the ministry made me think of a blog post I wrote over two years ago.  Therefore I am presenting to you the link to Gantry Collapse, for those who want a blast from the recent past.  Please note how that post documents the process by which religion used as a tool of domination eventually loses its power to dominate.