@being_on_line @bratton @NoemaMag 7/ What can drop out of view is an upstream dynamic more basic than intelligence itself: the ontology of representation. When representations outrun answerability, systems can function while severing their bond to the real. This isn't an effect; it's a foundational condition.
@JoshHochschild @jeff_bilbro 1/21 What’s striking isn’t that AI talk gets details wrong. It's that in lacking the category of 'environment', it simply can't see the basic thing. McLuhan's line holds: the more total the medium, the more its ambient structures and patterns render themselves strangely unseen.
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Copy of tweet thread here: On the one hand, this is a thoughtful reflections on certain risks of AI. On the other hand, it does not address the biggest risk of any new powerful technology: not its power or limits as tool in a given landscape of human intentions, but its potency to change the very landscape of intention—not to magnify or thwart but actually to replace acts, habits, relationships. Subtweet: The Adolescence of Technology: an essay on the risks posed by powerful AI to national security, economies and democracy—and how we can defend against them: Thread continues… It's striking to me how little understanding most (not all!) AI developers have of media/tech ecology. So many voices they just ignore on this. Whole dimensions of questions that never occur to them