Matthew B. Crawford writes:

As near as one can tell, the business rationale for artificial intelligence rests on the hope that it will substitute for human judgment and discretion. Given the role of big data in training AI systems, and the enormous concentrations of capital they require to develop, the AI revolution will extend the logic of oligopoly into cognition. What appears to be at stake, ultimately, is ownership of the means of thinking. This will have implications for class structure, for the legitimacy of institutions that claim authority based on expertise, and for the credentialing function of universities.

Consider some recent developments that don’t pertain to AI per se, but show the power that comes with ownership of computational infrastructure.

When Amazon Web Services went dark in October of this year, thousands of institutions were paralyzed for a few hours. Banks went offline; hospitals were unable to access medical records. Platforms that people rely on to communicate, such as Signal, also became nonresponsive. The cloud hosts an increasing share of the services that make a society run, routing them through a small number of firms. Our own government is also dependent on this infrastructure, and therefore dependent on the continued solvency of a handful of business enterprises. The phrase “too big to fail” hardly begins to capture the situation.

Computers and internet connections have been embedded in many material things that were once simply mechanical, and this provides a further point of leverage for whoever is able to route basic functionality through a network. For example, Volkswagen and Mercedes have announced that the performance of their electric cars will be tiered, with the higher levels of performance made functional by ongoing subscription (i.e. the motors can be de-tuned remotely). Likewise, BMW announced that the seats on new cars will be heated only through a monthly ritual of submission. The very concept of ownership becomes clouded under a subscription model, in which the things we depend on become sites of continuing wealth-extraction. [Continue reading…]