A Small Note on AI
Any concerns about AI become reduced to a moral dilemma or a great capital investment. Arguably, some are just as passionate about getting rid of data centers as vegans are about animals being confined in small cages for slaughter. I have yet to find someone passionate about both or perhaps I have not looked hard enough (probably the latter).
I think what concerns me is the depiction of a fruitless dichotomy: those who are for or against AI. It leaves little room for having a different conversation. None have yet to propose a challenge of imagination against those who support and use AI–instead we invite opposition rather than collaboration, ceasing the conversation immediately.
It is one thing to warn about where we believe we are heading with AI but another thing to create an environment of curiosity where our concerns and space of imagination can get to work. In other words, does anyone have new and interesting things to say about how we can relate to AI ? (Not about whether it's conscious or not or how it will destroy our ways of being human including the environment).
This is not to say that data centers are not real concerns or how AI does not impact our social/existential being in the world. The point is that mere moral opposition does not provide an alternative vision with AI. Instead, it attempts to re-invite human beings as the only nostalgic object worth talking about. The reality is people desperately want to know what a world with AI would be like but those conversations get reduced to either apocalyptic or financial visions.
The moralist must become Rorty's like ‘literary critic’ and propose new ways of being that invite re-imagining AI rather than having a strong oppositional reaction.