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The year of ‘does this serve us’ and the rejection of reification
Progress always seems like an inexorable arrow, but in 2024, given the progress of AI, we should all remember that it's guided by human agency.
Of course, it’s being cheerled by techno-zealot billionaires and the flunkies bunked within their cosy islands of influence, primarily in Silicon Valley – and derided by fabulists who stand to gain from painting the still-fictional artificial general intelligence (AGI) as humanity’s ur-bogeyman for the ages. Speed without caution only ever results in compounding problems that proponents often suggest are best-solved by pouring on more speed, possibly in a different direction, to arrive at some idealized future state where the problems of the past are obviated by the super powerful Next Big Thing of the future; calls to abandon or regress entire areas of innovation meanwhile ignore the complexity of a globalized world where cats generally can not be put back into boxes universally, among many, many other issues with that kind of approach. Utopian technologist zeal always fails to recognize that the bulk of humanity (techno-zealots included) are sometimes lazy, messy, disorganized, inefficient, error-prone and mostly satisfied with the achievement of comfort and the avoidance of boredom or harm.
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