On 10/2/23 10:38, mp via nettime-l wrote:
On 10/2/23 07:33, Christian Swertz via nettime-l wrote:
But I would really like to learn more about the idea that an AI
might be free. I've heard this quite often, but never understood
the concept. Can somebody help me?
It could possibly have to do with the concepts of the "earth rights
movements", which seek to decenter the perception and legal treatment
of "the environment" from the "white colonial gaze" where humans,
starting with "the White Male", is on top and in the centre and most
important, and where everyone and everything else is subordinate.
While I'm in favor of expending rights to non-humans (animals, plants,
ecosystems), I'm quite opposed to doing the same to technology.
This, as far as I can see, is a false symmetry.
The main reason why this is a false symmetry concerns a the question of
autonomy and with that, any notion of non-human self-hood. A tree
doesn't need humans to exist and from that you can assume that there is
an element of "treeness" that is beyond human utility. To preserve that,
against the Western, colonial tendency of "thingification", as Aimé
Césaire put it, the extension of rights might be the next best thing to
dismantling the Western notion of individual rights altogether.
Technology, including contemporary technology such as AI, is
fundamentally different from trees. Even if a certain degree of
'stochastic freedom' is built into it, technology is not, and cannot be,
autonomous. That would amount to a perpetuum mobile. And, more than
that, technology is fundamentally utilitarian. You might fall in love
with ChatGPT, but if OpenAI decides that providing the bot to you no
longer fits their business model, you're out of luck. That doesn't mean
that people are always fully in control, thousands of people die
everyday because people are not in full control over their cars, but
that doesn't make care somehow beyond human control.
As Joanna Bryson recently put it: "An AI system independent of humans is
the ultimate shell company, purely an available hiding place for
corruption by the human agencies that set it in place."
https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-very-short-primer-on-ai-ip-including.html?m=1
One might put it even stronger: To claim that an AI system is
independent of humans, is to create the ultimate shell company...." And
we definitely do not need more rights for shell companies.
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