Why AI? To Replace Women
It’s been a commonplace for years now to point out that tech bros and their tech companies have a serious consent problem. They’ll ask you to agree to web page notifications (which nobody ever wanted) and offer you just the two options “Yes” and “Ask me again later” — they literally won’t take “No” for an answer. Dark patterns like this — a structural contempt for your consent — are all over the internet that tech built.
Meanwhile, a lot of us have been wondering about the absolute wild frenzy of the billionaire techbros to deploy AI at scale in every software product and corporate service. It may not be strictly true that “nobody” wants their AI products, but if you don’t want them, nobody in the AI industry is willing to hear your objections. Your consent, or lack of it, is no concern of theirs. They are not listening.
What’s at the psychological heart of all that? Huge buckets of money, sure. But it feels like more. Presently they’re burning money at an unprecedented rate. And yeah, partly they hope to make it back when their AI goldrush claims prove out. But there’s more. This feels emotional. This feels ideological. The Epstein class is invested in ramming (and I chose this metaphor with both care and malice) AI down everyone’s throat. Why?
Here’s a video clip of V. Spehar at Under The Desk News offering what may be a partial answer. The clip’s a bit awkward, because she’s verbally describing what someone else said, and then she follows it up by describing a social media thread with some similar ideas from a different person. The transcript excerpts, I think, are easier to follow, but maybe that’s just me:
I asked Ashley St. Clair “Is AI inevitable? Where did this come from?”
She said no, AI is because capitalismers have reached a point where these dudes understand that they’ve extracted the most labor that they possibly can from a working proletariat. And so they’re like, well, if you won’t allow us to do slavery again, then we’ll just build AI to replace you and replace you in terms of labor, in terms of intelligence, in terms of creating culture, in terms of sex. She’s like, this all comes back to sex robots.
This all comes back to the idea of diminishing women’s place. It’s not just the AI that we see. The AI slop and the like, you know, summaries of stuff and all this business. She’s like, it’s using AI to create anatomical wombs so that they wouldn’t need women to incubate children.
V. then goes on to make the consent point more explicitly:
Francesca Ramsey had a good point on Threads the other day. She’s like, the way that the tech bros talk about AI is almost the way that rapists talk about rape. “Well, you can’t stop it. Well, it’s gonna happen to you. Well, you might as well not resist it. Well, it won’t be as bad if you don’t resist.”
She’s like, you need to hear the meaning behind the ways that they’re saying that this is inevitable, that you have no choice, no autonomy, no ability to say no. We absolutely have the right to say no and a duty to say no.
Is any of this correct? I’m way too distant from the corridors of techbro power to say for sure. But it has the ring of truth to it. It feels just the same as when they won’t let us say “NO” to their fucking cookies and web page notifications. It explains the seeming contempt and disdain for user preferences that make the AI buildout different from tech bubbles we have seen before. The bros aren’t chasing a market full of users who want their product; they are building (under this theory) a world with more slaves in it, and they are absolutely foaming for that outcome.
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Leaving aside the question of why companies are pushing AI, it seems clear to me that the motivation for building AI was not neo-slavery or misogyny. The capitalists didn’t just wake up one day in 2018 and decide to “build AI.” Computer scientists have been trying to build artificial intelligence for at least half a century. It’s a really really hard problem. And my impression is that before we saw the negative effects of ChatGPT, most people thought it was a worthy goal. Remember Watson?
Fuck AI! Fuck Microsoft! Fuck Google! Fuck Facebook! (Did I leave anyone out?)
Anon, what you’re talking about is usually a sidebar in current conversations, under the subject header of “General AI” or what we used to think of as “true AI”. The LLM technology now being marketed as “AI” isn’t that.
And anyway, you moved the ball. This post is about “why are they in such a frenzy to deploy this unpopular product?” It was never about “why did they research and build this product?” Picking nits about the definition of AI fifty years ago or in 2018, as I did in the first paragraph of this comment, is completely aside from that. Why they started researching it and why they’re trying to rebuild society around it are very different questions!
LLMs are just the latest methodology being tested by the overlords to find an easier way to build a subjugated populace, right up there with credit cards and mortgages and surveillance in and out of your homes and your cars and your digital watches.
Slavery went out of style because it was made obsolete. You don’t need chains on people when you can get them to stay in the unlocked cage by themselves. They used the dissemination of religion for centuries in the same way as the LLMs are being developed to do now.
And they don’t have a plan for the long run, which is the probably the most tragic part of it all; they want what they want right now — today. Beyond the next quarter they don’t *care* and they think their massive wealth and “power” they exert will save them. “Sinnerman, where you going to run to?”
Personally I think much of this comes from the contempt Steve Jobs had for people. Apple under his control didn’t ask users what they wanted, or allow user choice. They consistently have made decisions and pushed the results at users. The say yes now or later model detailed above is familiar to anyone who has owned an Apple product.
That business model works, those of us who want control or change, who want devices to not have built in obsolescence (whether directly or enforced by guard labor like Cloudfront) are in the minority, and ignored. Our money becomes irrelevant when you can convince the next generation that those rights or options never existed, and that your model is the only one.
Apple were the first company I saw where the user was irrelevant, and it remains to this day a place where users, even internal ones, are ignored.
And as a successful company, if they can succeed with that contempt basked in, well it’s just easier to ignore users and copy them.
In the early 1980s I worked for a short time for a company that made a product called “The Final Word” (by people who were responsible (in large part) for EMACS and SCRIBE) the be-all to end-all word processing software. It was completely customizable and it could do anything (and everything) to a document you can imagine. It was goddess’s gift to all mankind but professional writers in particular.
It got CRUSHED in the open market by Wordperfect and Microsoft Word. It couldn’t even compete with Wang, sadly. Why? Because no one wanted to spend the time to learn how to use it. The “public” wanted nothing more complicated to use than a rotary dial phone, iirc.
Honestly there are days when I think we should have listened harder to Ken Olsen.
Fuzzy, I was a WordStar fan myself. But I had to shift to WordPerfect because WordStar started fading from the market and wasn’t supported on any of the platforms I had access to after about 1988.
Messrs Cook and Ives are very fond of the Ford quote ‘If I’d asked people what they wanted they’d have said better horses’. That gets used to justify all kinds of stupidity like the touch bar.
In general I agree that users ‘on average’ are poorly informed and often lazy, but I have always said that power users are worthy of attention, and even an average user can generate valuable insights. So rather than dumb down, give the power user everything, and give the average user enough, and work on the balance.
That however is very much not the trend. However companies like Lux and Serif as was buck that and have always catered to power users and taken the average user on a journey. I suspect Final Word failed to engage average users with their UI based on EMACS, which can overwhelm even power UNIX users. Speaking as a LISP programmer who uses vi because life is too short for EMACS.
PS MS Word user from late 80s till they screwed the menus and what is now LibreOffice since, except for a period where I had to use Pages. But also LaTeX and Postscript programmer.