March 3 - The Star

Hope, inspiration, future goals. A much more positive card than we've had so far!

But it's hard to feel positive about the massively exploitative and yet still totally underwhelming reality of artificial intelligence and quantum computing hype at the moment. The idea of an omnipotent computer, that could, indeed, simulate or work at an atomic or subatomic level, has kind of been the great dream of computing for a long time. It's almost a philosopher's stone type of thing.

Yesterday I reread this great essay on the current generative AI models by Hito Steyerl. She does a great job of going into how reliant these systems still are on human-made images, cleaned data, and ongoing human moderation at every level, but she also makes the observation that while their outputs masquerade as bits of text or images, which people wrongly attribute intention or creativity to, they're really statistical representations, with all of the inherent ideology and limitations of statistics baked in.

What would a truly intelligent computer capable of expanding our analytical powers and relieving the burden of tedious labor and the risks of incomplete information look like, and under what context would it be used to reinvent life towards more autonomy and joy rather than accelerating exploitation and control? Can we hope for such a thing with IBM and DARPA still in the picture...?