Sharp framing. Underneath the governance question is a mirror problem: AI disciplines toward whatever its operators already value, amplified. So "who disciplines whom" collapses into "whose self-knowledge is steering it" — institutions included. Wrote a book on the human seat of authority, free thru 6/3: amazon.com/dp/B0H3HY8W9F
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams joked that philosophers demanded “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” once a machine started producing answers. The modern AI panic has created the same economy. Vast numbers of academics, ethicists, and professional critics now make careers denouncing systems they scarcely understand, because alarmism pays better than technical competence and confusion is easier to sell than clarity.
This all boils down to who has power to govern the other. But while we're at it, why not go full Lessig and consider the complete set of 4 governance forces: market, norms, tech, and law (i.e. the expression of state power)? What's interesting about the Pope's recent foray is that you actually see a religion try to make inroads on the normative dimension...
My sense is that to the extent that AI enables capital to become even more global and footloose, then the state and labor will become even further disadvantaged. The state is bound by geography. Capital much less so, so the argument goes.
Opposition to data centers in the U.S. shows that tangible, place-bound aspects of AI can be targeted by democratic opposition. Capital does have a place, but only partly. Since the internet is a global network that can draw on and enable compute and production globally. ‘Redundancy’ is built into the web and the cloud. What could be a more global concept than that - we don’t rely on you!
AI is one of the most global forms of capital to be produced, I would suggest, since it’s trained on the entire corpus of the internet. Its production process consists of algorithms that could be run anywhere. (Perhaps inference benefits from geographic proximity?)
A related issue to place is that the intellectual form of property (as intangible things) is inherently tricky for states to deal with since it’s intangible. States don’t know what to do with big tech, even if big tech knows what to do with its intellectual property (register it in Ireland).
The sovereignty rhetoric coming out of the EU and the UK is an attempt to try put a singular place on AI capital, even if its production and consumption might inherently not want that?
Sharp framing. Underneath the governance question is a mirror problem: AI disciplines toward whatever its operators already value, amplified. So "who disciplines whom" collapses into "whose self-knowledge is steering it" — institutions included. Wrote a book on the human seat of authority, free thru 6/3: amazon.com/dp/B0H3HY8W9F
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams joked that philosophers demanded “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” once a machine started producing answers. The modern AI panic has created the same economy. Vast numbers of academics, ethicists, and professional critics now make careers denouncing systems they scarcely understand, because alarmism pays better than technical competence and confusion is easier to sell than clarity.
https://jbsections.substack.com/p/academics-denouncing-aino-technical
This all boils down to who has power to govern the other. But while we're at it, why not go full Lessig and consider the complete set of 4 governance forces: market, norms, tech, and law (i.e. the expression of state power)? What's interesting about the Pope's recent foray is that you actually see a religion try to make inroads on the normative dimension...
Really enjoyed this piece.
My sense is that to the extent that AI enables capital to become even more global and footloose, then the state and labor will become even further disadvantaged. The state is bound by geography. Capital much less so, so the argument goes.
Opposition to data centers in the U.S. shows that tangible, place-bound aspects of AI can be targeted by democratic opposition. Capital does have a place, but only partly. Since the internet is a global network that can draw on and enable compute and production globally. ‘Redundancy’ is built into the web and the cloud. What could be a more global concept than that - we don’t rely on you!
AI is one of the most global forms of capital to be produced, I would suggest, since it’s trained on the entire corpus of the internet. Its production process consists of algorithms that could be run anywhere. (Perhaps inference benefits from geographic proximity?)
A related issue to place is that the intellectual form of property (as intangible things) is inherently tricky for states to deal with since it’s intangible. States don’t know what to do with big tech, even if big tech knows what to do with its intellectual property (register it in Ireland).
The sovereignty rhetoric coming out of the EU and the UK is an attempt to try put a singular place on AI capital, even if its production and consumption might inherently not want that?