This Machine Kills

We get into Evgeny Morozov’s latest essay on the geopolitical interests and military neoliberalism that’s really driving the AI arms race. Morozov traces today’s developments back to the Cold War – not just as a metaphor, but by showing how many of the same people and institutions are still in positions of power. To understand the America vs China framing of technological competition, which is now so dominant and two-dimensional in the discourse about AI, we must see how it is stoked by people like Eric Schmidt and Gilman Louie and their networks of influence, capital, and ideology.

Article we discuss:

••• AI: the key battleground for Cold War 2.0? | Evgeny Morozov https://mondediplo.com/2023/05/02china

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We cruise into the drive-thru of Taco Bell’s Innovation Lab and discuss the strange sublime of food that has been industrially engineered to hit every pleasure center in your brain, while also profaning all this is holy and natural in this world. We are awe-struck by the productive capacity and scientific innovation of capital, while also in total horror of what it has produced and innovated. And yes, I will add a Doritos Loco Taco to my meal. Thanks.

Article we discuss

••• Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen, the Front Line in the Stunt-Food Wars https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/taco-bells-innovation-kitchen-the-front-line-in-the-stunt-food-wars

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We are very pleased to be joined by Sarah Myers West— managing director of AI Now Institute and former Senior Advisor on AI to the FTC—to discuss their excellent new report, 2023 Landscape: Confronting Tech Power. We lay out how the dominance of Big Tech is built on a triforce of advantages: data, compute, geopolitical. These advantages serve as both core pillars and core chokepoints for corporate control over AI. And if we hope to overturn their power, then we must undermine these advantages. The report lays out a number of key interventions for policy, regulation, and organizing.

••• 2023 Landscape report: https://ainowinstitute.org/general/2023-landscape-executive-summary

••• Sarah’s twitter: https://twitter.com/sarahbmyers

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

Returning champion David A. Banks joins us for a supersized discussion about his new book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. How do cities have to act like social media influencers to attract new flows of capital? How are fundamental dynamics of capitalist urban development — growth machines, rent gaps, spatial fixes, destructive renovation, entrepreneurial competition — updated and upgraded to fit into the techno-financial conditions of today? Why does every downtown have the same damn wine bar now? Join us for answers to all these questions and much more.

••• David’s book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383456/the-city-authentic

••• David’s twitter: https://twitter.com/DA_Banks

••• David’s substack: https://otherday.substack.com/

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We talk about the federal intelligence agencies being big fans of great books and movies, and writing about them in their little newsletters. Then move on to a big discussion about how the tech industry has been buoyed by a whole lot of nothing: zero interest rates, zero marginal costs, zero regulation, zero oversight. Those zeroes are key to the political economic foundation of Silicon Valley. And now – due to social, financial, and technological factors – the zeroes are increasing slightly. Will AI be the perpetual value machine that finally helps capital resolve all its contradictions and ascend to the next level? Of course not. But that won’t stop them from trying to force the impossible anyway.

Articles we discuss

••• “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” Move Poses Terror Threat, Kansas City Intel Agency Claims https://theintercept.com/2023/04/11/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-movie/

••• Is Environmental Radicalism Inevitable? https://newrepublic.com/article/171560/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline-young-activists

••• TechScape: The end of the ‘free money’ era https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/11/techscape-zirp-tech-boom

••• Putting the Silicon in Silicon Valley https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/john-lanchester/putting-the-silicon-in-silicon-valley

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We go in-depth on an article that has not received the attention it is due: an investigation into an automated welfare fraud system in the Netherlands, which is based on unprecedented access to the machine learning model, its training data, and operational handbooks. Through a deep analysis of the systems mechanics, this investigation goes beyond validating what we already know to be true about how such algorithms discriminate. It shows how these systems are complex and targeted in their discrimination, while also being simplistic and arbitrary in their decisions.

Articles we discuss

••• Inside the Suspicion Machine https://www.wired.com/story/welfare-state-algorithms/

••• Welfare surveillance system violates human rights, Dutch court rules https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/welfare-surveillance-system-violates-human-rights-dutch-court-rules

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We cruise through a few topics: talk about the anti-China alliance between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill pushing to ban TikTok; the bizarre post-mortem on SPACs published by their biggest booster, Chamath Palihapitiya; and the regular beat of people having no idea how to understand AI, while also being absolutely positive that they can harness it to [fix democracy].

Articles we discuss

••• Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill Build an Anti-China Alliance https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-and-capitol-hill-build-an-anti-china-alliance-e508c75e

••• 2022 Annual Letter | Chamath Palihapitiya https://chamath.substack.com/p/2022-annual-letter

••• Another Crack at Chamath Palihapitiya’s Letter to SPAC Investors https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-06/another-crack-at-chamath-palihapitiya-s-letter-to-spac-investors

••• Can A.I. and Democracy Fix Each Other? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/opinion/artificial-intelligence-democracy-chatgpt.html

••• Special Report: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

It’s a fan cam episode for our favorite tech columnist, Brian Merchant, who had two pieces come out recently that are back-to-back bangers. First is about why all the people making and selling AI keep talking about being afraid of their own creations. It’s Frankenstein meets sorcerer's apprentice but as a marketing strategy for their own power (and their unique ability to control that power). Second is about what all these people should actually be afraid of. As history shows us, there is more than one way to crash a computer.

Article we discuss

••• Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be | Brian Merchant https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-03-31/column-afraid-of-ai-the-startups-selling-it-want-you-to-be

••• Silicon Valley elites are afraid. History says they should be | Brian Merchant: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-03-24/column-how-afraid-should-silicon-valley-be

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We give ourselves a concussion by talking about yet another opinion essay about AI written by three “experts” and published by a major newspaper. How is AI doing neuro-linguistic programming? What happens when your analysis is all idealism, no materialism, all superstructure, no base? Will AI soon use its godlike powers to hack civilization and create militant groups at its command just by telling us the right story? Wait, you’re telling me we have to take this shit seriously because the authors have direct lines of influence to people who have actual political power and control capital? Goddamnit.

Article we discuss

••• You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills | Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/opinion/yuval-harari-ai-chatgpt.html

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

We are joined by Abeba Birhane — Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation — for a critical discussion about the release of GPT-4 and OpenAI. We also get into the excellent work that Abeba and colleagues have done mapping the specific values encoded into, and the surveillance pipeline that influences, the vast majority of AI/ML research.

••• Abeba’s twitter: https://twitter.com/Abebab

••• Abeba’s paper – The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3531146.3533083

Stuff we referenced

••• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will reshape society, acknowledges risks: 'A little bit scared of this' https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-reshape-society-acknowledges/story?id=97897122

••• GPT-4 Technical Report https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf

••• Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

••• The Sparks of AGI? Or the End of Science? https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-sparks-of-agi-or-the-end-of-science

••• GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)