AI is closely aligned with power, and I've found a lot of people in tech have a problematic relationship with the notion of power.

[abucci@buc.ci]

AI is closely aligned with power, and I've found a lot of people in tech have a problematic relationship with the notion of power. Tech has been an ascendant sector for awhile and is currently fusing with state power, which I think would naturally lead to people in this sector having internal conflict over what exactly they do. Also I think people with controlling personalities are drawn to the seemingly "clear", black-and-white nature of tech, where "truth" can be discerned with less ambiguity than in other areas of life. I don't get the sense from interactions I've had with people in tech that there is much introspection or circumspection about their relationship with various forms of power. Not to the extant that folks routinely grapple deeply with the power dynamics at play within this sector and its relation to the rest of society, anyway. Obviously I'm painting with broad strokes here, and I don't mean to downplay the acts of those who do grapple meaningfully with power. I'm just talking about a tendency I've observed over my own career.

I think some of the strange shifts we're seeing in high-profile folks in tech who already had authoritarian impulses---which, let's be real, is uncomfortably common among tech workers---is that they are groping for ways to embrace taking power that do not run afoul of other values they've endorsed. This really can't be done unless the person was already pretty antisocial, so we see weird behavior such as running self-serving "surveys" about AI with foregone conclusions, microaggressions and dissembling, attacks and other forms of hostility, being "one shotted" or conflating a computer program with humanness, etc. It's really a general problem, in that view, given how the US regime has shifted away from social democracy/liberalism into a much more brash, violent, and authoritarian stance. There are a variety of ways to cope with such a shift, one being to embrace it while bursting into a cloud of internal contradictions.

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