The famous scientist, Stephen Hawking once warned that artificial intelligence (Ai) would be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity.” The issue is which human social force – which economic class of people – controls it.
ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence program that can compose in seconds intriguing new music, new art and new essays. It is not a search engine like Google. It gets creative and makes things up. These programs are a new form of Ai – generative Ai – based on large language machine-learning models and expansive digital neural networks inspired by the billions of neurons connected in the human brain.
McKinsey & Company, one of the top management corporations of global capitalism, discusses the current explosion of generative Ai:
“[T]hanks to their broad utility – almost anyone can use them to communicate and create … their ability to write text, compose music, and create digital art that has garnered headlines and persuaded consumers and households to experiment on their own.”
McKinsey Digital — The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier
As with every technology, Ai presents humanity with wonderous new possibilities to understand and change the world, heal the human rift with nature and unleash everyone’s human potential. Or …. It will remain under the domination of parasitic, extractive capitalism and will be twisted to produce private profit. We have seen this before. In the 1990s with the corporate seizure and privatization of the Internet. Capitalism dominated its structure, limited our access and increased surveillance. As capitalism lurches into the Ai gold rush, the questions are what can it do, and then … what should it do? All this depends on who controls Ai.
PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE CONTROL ISSUES
Many people were stunned when all the big tech companies released their Ai software to the public in the 2010s. Doesn’t big tech benefit from selling Ai to the rest of us? The reality is that corporations find it much cheaper to share the software and let the public debug and perfect the software. Corporations can then work out how to perfect and privatize the tools needed to explore oceans of Big Data, rather than trying to own the ocean itself.
A fundamental law of software is that it is not sufficient to create it. It must be applied and tried out – multiple iterations must be tested – before the bugs are worked out, including addressing built-in social biases. Early on, before programs and code was legalized as digital private property, experts released the programs to other experts so many people could debug the software. This is still a common practice with open-source products. The Linux operating system was released as open-source in 1991. Since so many people were tweaking Linux, it developed into a faster, stronger and more flexible system than was employed in many tech companies. Corporations learn quickly.
ChatGPT is a quantum leap in the scale of information commonly available to all. The program was “trained” on our various internet inputs, so the only way to test and/or optimize it is to allow us to engage with it more, since “it” effectively is a mirror of human behaviors in the first place. Information is fundamentally a human social relation between people since people must agree on its significance. ChatGPT was trained on Reddit, an ocean of human relations.
This explains why ChatGPT was released to the public. Whether capitalism will succeed in limiting public access to Ai is as yet unresolved. Is it even possible that capitalism can still sustain itself by privatizing and controlling knowledge?
AI AND THE HUMAN POTENTIAL OF NEW SOCIAL RELATIONS
ChatGPT might “create” 10,000 new pictures in 15 seconds, but to the software these pictures are all the same, even when human values are programmed in. Generative Ai can generate a library of tools. But these tools are meaningless until they are wielded by people with a purpose. That’s a human social relation. The social revolution that society is now going through demands new social relations. LGBTQ+ people, minorities and all marginalized people demand to be fully human, while fascism tells us to hate each other for our differences, rather than cooperating to secure what we all need to thrive.
Capitalism preaches that Ai will make people more productive, but that is not the issue. The real deal is that human social relations are still twisted by capitalism. Our fundamental problems are social in nature, not technological. The social institutions of capitalism and private property impose rigid human relations of exploitation and oppression. Many of these are foundering today since they were never designed to operate in the digital era. The question for revolutionaries is how can Ai be used to challenge and change how capitalism blocks all of us from being fully human.
Ultimately, Ai cannot be suppressed, any more than uploading photos could be suppressed after phones included cameras. Information is now so vast that no one can own it. No matter how hard you try, you can’t build a fence around the ocean. Fences leak and firewalls get tunneled through.
The goal of optimizing human consciousness and collectivity is the only thing that can sustainably survive and manage this technology, the only thing that can harness this potentiality. We can expand on how this technology augments interactions between human beings. Communication proliferates, stimulating cooperation, and then empowering collaboration to produce common endeavors. This direction is objective and will not stop before the rise of new synergies, human networks beginning to work together in unison for specific goals.
From the Egyptian Spring in 2011 to George Floyd to Cop City, many digitally augmented political forms of collaboration have already been developed by the peoples of the world, seizing information technology (IT) as they attempt to build their own political power. Collaboration between individual human beings is passing to collaboration between human networks, increasingly taking on a political character. Human collaboration can and will seize the offensive against a desperate geriatric capitalism that produces the destruction of lives, of the environment and the climate.
Ai and IT in all its forms can be used to create a cooperative society or to hinder its development. The future of humanity and nature will be guaranteed by abolishing the private ownership of tools, technologies and nature and replacing it with complete open, broad public inclusive ownership as a public resource, a public utility, a public good. Public property is the guarantee that each of us has the broadest open access to the world. It guarantees everything to everybody. Artificial intelligence just to make a private profit? Elementary school children today recognize that this is not sustainable.
Published on August 26, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
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