°
Everyone has some facet in which they are over indexed for identity.
"I may not drink, but I run marathons" or "I may be soft around the middle, but I’m hard-core for (name your salvation)."
this point of fixation (fixity) becomes our flag and crutch. while we prefer the single utility machine, taken to a robotic, uncompromising extreme, there are those looking for the mutable and mushy, the gelatinous, from which fluid change is possible, and no singular point can be determined or taken.
°
The threat of artificial intelligence seems to be the culmination of our dedicated efforts:
We worked extremely hard to make ourselves altogether irrelevant.
This is an extension of competitive, capitalist labor into the digitized world where we labor against ourselves until we are extraneous. We have replaced our enslavement to the cruel master.
Perhaps now free of our servitude to machines/data we can return to being human and caring about human things. But I doubt it.
°
A car that uses computers and plastics to achieve more miles per gallon but only lasts ten years, and can only be repaired by highly specialized technicians, has a higher overall cost than its purported savings.
There are still VW Beetles running nearly 100 years after production. The cost of making an object one time (rather than ten objects), which can be repaired by a neighbor with a bit of savvy, has proven more cost-effective, human-empowering, and environmentally beneficial than all of our refined tweaking and regulations.
Our habit of promoting "advancement" or "progress" robs the populace of agency. We have created a society where we outsource problems and purchase for shallow novelty: by design, these traits create fragility through dependence.
°
Art is a subset of our culture, reacting to new technological innovations, ideas, and politico-historical moments.
To decide to protect art from technology, (such as AI or NFT) is not in the spirit of art, nor the function of art: property (and protection of) is the realm of copyright and commerce.
Arguably, art can never be commerce. Art should react, not sequester.
°
How we shape our world shapes us: the dead raccoon on the side of the road is an antiquated species amidst the speed of progress.
Unfortunately, humans become the next inconvenient casualty as technology outruns our slow flesh.
It remains true: how you treat others will become your fate.
°
The root meaning of “auto” is self or spontaneous. Yet the automobile is not self-moving, autonomy is not self-will (since we are externally shared and motivated), and automatic always requires intervention.
“Auto” is more of a matter of degree. We hand over control to processes that promise freedom, yet more often cleverly disguise long-distance reliance (oil, software, labor, or ideology), which automates us in trade for a “convenience.”
°
Technology moves rapidly forward, providing new options through speed and extended agency.
Culture (religion and tradition) remains slow, providing stability and attempting to secure identity against the void of meaninglessness.
When a culture uses technology, it adopts asymmetrical aims: to stabilize through speed. The problem manifests when converts leave rapidly: the speed of adoption is directly proportional to stabilization.
°
Magic is in you, you can’t become magic.
Technology, on the other hand, promises empowerment through application and effort.
However, technology often becomes anti-egalitarian by limiting access, rendering it’s promise back into the realm of magic.
°
A computer is a processing machine. Not a thinking machine.
It subordinates all things into processed information, anything unmeasurable becomes unimportant.
"Belief" is not a function, yet we now consider what you do (measurable action) to be the equivalent of what you believe (ideological stance).
This linguistic supplantation through analogy -allowing processing to appear as thinking or belief to become simply a function- separates a complicated set of interwoven connections for simplistic measurables: provable feats aligning us to technology and away from humanity.
