Supremacy
AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World
Parmy Olson
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Well written and researched but despite a couple of informative and perceptive sections in amongst the sea of words it was just, well, a bit dull.
There’s no doubt artificial intelligence will have its benefits and uses but the rampant capitalist, neoliberal threads running through the grand visions and justifications for it are just seemingly getting in the way of some quite simple generational changes to attitudes and approaches to growth and consumption that, to me, seem much more legitimate and worthy of the Western world following so that artificial intelligence doesn’t solely continue perpetuating capitalist myths, myopia and unfairness inherent in its patriarchal existence of essentially monopolising civilisation for a profit . . . again!
A good passage
Language and terminology would end up playing an enormous role in the development of Al, driving interest to sometimes maddening effect. The term itself, artificial intelligence, was coined back in 1956 at a workshop at Dartmouth College that was aimed at pulling together ideas about ‘thinking machines’. There were various other names for the new field at the time, like cybernetics and complex information processing, but artificial intelligence stuck. It went on to become one of the most successful marketing terms of all time and spawned a collection of other terms that anthropomorphise machines in our collective consciousness, often lending them more capability than they deserve. It isn’t technically accurate, for instance, to suggest that computers can ‘think’ or ‘learn’, but phrases like neural network, deep learning, and training help promote that idea in our minds by lending software humanlike qualities, even when they’re only loosely inspired by the human brain.