Weekly Grounding #43
Special edition on AI
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Each Weekly Grounding generally touches on a wide range of topics related to Handful of Earth’s broad focus on culture, politics, and technology. This week, however, I happened to read a number of interesting pieces on artificial intelligence, so decided to make AI the theme of Weekly Grounding #43.
“OpenAI and Meta Ready New AI Models Capable of ‘Reasoning’”
The Financial Times reports on forthcoming AI large language models from OpenAI and Meta. Vice-president of AI research at Meta, Joelle Pineau, states that “We are hard at work in figuring out how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan . . . to have memory.” Whether this is possible, or simply an over-hyped claim by these companies, is up for debate. What is not up for debate is the extent to which these new models will be integrated into some of the most popular smartphone apps in the world. The article notes that “Meta plans to embed its new AI model into WhatsApp.” Yann LeCun, Meta’s reckless and supercilious chief AI scientist, proclaims that “We will be talking to these AI assistants all the time…Our entire digital diet will be mediated by AI systems.”
For more on the the worldview that undergirds attitudes like LeCun’s on AI, see my essay, “Telos or Transhumanism?”
“Humans Forget. AI Assistants Will Remember Everything”
Wired paints a picture of what these “AI Assistants” may look like in practice: “[P]hones may soon employ something akin to constant screenshots powered by AI, snapping images of your phone’s screen every few seconds and storing those images for later use. Then when you find you can’t recall a certain detail—maybe you’re trying to remember the particulars of a conversation you had, or the name of somebody you met three months ago—you could ask an AI assistant. The assistant would be able to call up everything it deems relevant, from across your messaging apps, emails, and LinkedIn DMs to provide an answer.”
Patrick Moorhead, president of the tech firm Moor Insights and Strategies, argues: “I think this will be in every end device operating system by the end of this year…It will give you cross application ability, across Microsoft, across Google, across Apple environments. Taking tiny little snapshots of everything you do on your phone. And then what it's doing is cross-correlating everything to give you better results.”
“Canada Unveils Billions for Artificial Intelligence”
Governments, too, are putting forth massive investments in the new AI arms race. The Wall Street Journal reports on the Trudeau government’s decision to “spend C$2.4 billion that would, among other things, help build data centers and servers and ensure access to the computer power required to conduct research in the AI field.” The Canadian government’s pledge to bolster AI investment was coupled with a pledge to increase defense spending.
“‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza”
AI and war are now intimately connected endeavors. In this chilling report for +972 Magazine, Yuval Abraham meticulously documents Israel’s implementation of the “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” AI systems in its ongoing bombing campaign in Gaza: “During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about ‘20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”
The article continues: “[T]he Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called ‘Where’s Daddy’ also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.”
The disturbing details of “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” are revealed in Abraham’s extended piece of investigative journalism, which, alongside his reporting from last year at +972, serves as crucial documentation of Israel’s AI-assisted genocide in Gaza.
“The Future Belongs to Right-Wing Progressives”
While not specifically on the topic of AI, this column by
at Unherd explores the growing appeal of “Right-wing progressivism,” the ideology espoused by the most vocal proponents of artificial intelligence. Harrington characterizes the Nayib Bukele government in El Salvador as a practical instantiation of right-wing progressivism: “Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room, Bukele’s offer to the people of El Salvador seems as energetically futurist as it does authoritarian on public safety.”Harrington goes on to discuss Bukele’s move to offer 5,000 free visas to “highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers” (many undoubtedly involved in AI research). She productively places this policy decision in the context of competing ideological perspectives on immigration: “How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask. Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion. The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discriminatory as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likelihood of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.”
For more on the complex ideological landscape of contemporary global politics, see my recent piece, “Does This Political Category Exist?”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
This is why 10 years ago I concluded that the resistance must prioritize the building and coding of a real life Terminator 2 as the only hope. It must be coded for critical thinking to be resistant to all cults — xianity, wokeism, Islam, New Age, Falun Gong, scientology and more — and be able to rewrite the code of enemy AI accordingly. Instead of committing suicide when empire is deposed, it's needed permanently to combat andronarcissist and sometimes ethnonarcissist factions from seeking to succeed empire. It's also permanently needed to individually protect Womyn, Children, Elders and People with Disabilities from male violence and to hunt down hereditary psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists and borderline personalities.