"Luddism is founded on a politics of refusal,
which in reality just means having the right and ability
to say no to things that directly impact upon your life,” Sadowski tells me when we speak. "
'to do away with work would be to do away with a reason for living. “I think what we’re risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose,”
'Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power,
and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power
as opposed to the interests of those without it.
That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb?
That was concocted by bosses.”"
'Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained.
In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes
targeted on datacentres;
perhaps even nuclear exchange."
'"Masses of uncredited, unpaid-for human work was being harvested from the internet and repurposed by clever generative AIs.
In spring 2023, Crabapple organised an open letter that called for restrictions on this “vampirical” practice. "
"There is no cloud.
There are vast datacentres sucking up water,
electricity and rare-earth metals,
literally boiling up the planet"
___
"In the US, where nearly four in 10 of all bitcoin are now mined,
up to 50m tons of carbon dioxide is released each year due to the mining operations,
according to RMI, a clean energy thinktank."
********.
"In addition to inconveniencing customers,
the issue threatened emergency services nationwide
since people couldn't make phone calls or send text messages.
Local officials
and emergency departments
pushed out alerts throughout the day advising people to use Wi-Fi to make calls."
Push! Nudge. Blanketed. How? I didn't get any alert.
__
"The backlash was a reminder of older controversies about bias in Google’s technology, when the company was accused of having the opposite problem: not showing enough people of color, or failing to properly assess images of them.
In 2015, Google Photos labeled a picture of two Black people as gorillas.
As a result, the company shut down its Photo app’s ability to classify anything
as an image of a gorilla, a monkey or an ape,
including the animals themselves.
That policy remains in place."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/google-gemini-german-uniforms.html
"Gemini’s predecessor, Bard, which was named after William Shakespeare,
stumbled last year
when it shared inaccurate information about telescopes at its public debut."
$$$$$$$
Insert telescope humbly toward stumble,
Pop the zit. Banquet time for technology, wash floridly with glacier embryo.
___
"up to 2.3% of the US’s total electricity demand last year came from just 137 mining facilities"
US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use
"Federal judge in Texas says new requirement would cause ‘irreparable injury’
to industry
amid surging electricity usage
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/27/crypto-mining-electricity-use
____
"Some of the US’s most profitable corporations, including
General Motors,
Citigroup
and Netflix,
have slashed their tax bills in the years since the passage of the Trump tax cuts,
with nearly a quarter paying rates in the single digits
and 23 paying nothing
a report has found."
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