CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@johnjohnston Thanks! It really made me think while I was on holiday!

I've been reading Jorge Luis Borges' short stories recently.

One in particular about a lottery that quietly took over everything, and another involving a library where everything is available but nothing is findable, felt a bit too close to how AI is reshaping decision‑making, governance, and “optional” tools for nonprofits.

So I wrote about it
https://blog.dougbelshaw.com/the-ai-lottery/

#AI #AIGovernance #FOSS #Nonprofits

@Wtebbens This is great

(I didn't simplify the verbose academese to agree with it)

To which my response is, yes, but that questioning isn't in the hands of individual users but rather on the level of nation states.

So calling on people to 'decompute' is a rallying cry to the kind of opting out that might make sense in terms of appealing to people's ethics, but is interminably difficult under capitalism.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/116098694142499511

TL;DR: AI keeps getting massive investment despite not working as promised. This is because AI isn't really a technology solution, but instead a way for existing power structures to maintain control as the old world order falls apart. It makes the problems it claims to solve *worse* rather than better.

The alternative is "decomputing": less tech, instead of more; slower, not faster; tools built around collective care rather than automation.

Instead of asking how to power bigger data centres, we should ask who should control society's energy and water in the first place.

@mattblaze Likewise. With the added bonus of having not being convicted to a decade in an Iranian jail: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c747nqply93o