10 ms·

Douglas Rushkoff: Crashing Technosolutionism [video]

87 points by blueridge 3y ago

rektide 3y ago
What a fragging amazing treasure. Rushkoff has just gotten better and better over time, more and more on point. Humble fun opening: > I thought i was supposed to go out there to do this talk on the digital future & do this talk on the digital future - you know what I usually do -& just try to make people angry, you know- wealthy people upset by telling them people what this technology is for, and all that, and business plans are stupid, and killing the world.... Real talk middle, about the brutal indifferent stasism of AI: > The dataset on which we are feeding our ai's is us. Is what we are actually doing. We have created a situation where we have a generation of very powerful children learning how to be, based on how we are. > The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves.
- ggm 3y ago
  > The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves. I dunno, wasn't Saint Augustine "lord make me good, but not yet" pretty much admitting that our heroes have feet of clay, and yet they function as educators and leaders. If you modulate the training set through externally derived axioms of good and bad, can't you train an AI on objectively naughty data to recognise the anti-set of good behaviour?
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    Do we WANT the AI judging us as good / bad?
    - rektide 3y ago
      A major thread through the talk is that there are powers that be that think they have the answers & want to shape & mold us. Not super clearly stated, but implicitly said, it rarely works & the hubris almost always causes huge problems, is a projection rather than what the world wants or needs. If AI is judging us, it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris filled megalomaniacs. The rest of humanity doesn't really have/isn't permitted much of a say in the matter.
      - kuchenbecker 3y ago
        > it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris My argument would be this is both likely and inevitable where there AI is used as a judge. OpenAI, for example, has material explaining how they prune and curate their datasets to alter it's biases.
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    The issue of what is good or bad is all a matter of perspective though. On the extreme end of this is - What one side considered a terrorist, the other considers them a liberating warrior. That is easy at that scale but the finer grain you go on morals the more fuzzy it gets and the more push back you will get from all directions. This is how you get things like the 1946 Obscenity threshold of "I know it when I see it". Many saw the 2008 crash as a major issue that destroyed the lives of millions of people, some hard line environmentalists saw it as the single great decrease in consumption we have ever had.
- wpietri 3y ago
  "I don't necessarily like tech bros but I like talking with tech bros and at tech bros because they're easy to upset. The main way you upset them is by asserting either their humanity or everyone else's humanity." Ok, this is now on my watchlist. Such a good summation.
  - peepeepoopoo15 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - freetime2 3y ago
    I don't think that making denigrating remarks about any group of people (even "tech bros") is a good way to start a talk. It signals to me that the speaker is more interested in identity politics, pitting "us" against "them" because that's what seems to hold peoples' attention these days, rather than serious solutions.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - camillomiller 3y ago
      Yeah, that’s what a techbro would say
      - corinroyal 3y ago
        LMFAO!
      - tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
        And this, folks, is how you get techbros.
    - partomniscient 3y ago
      Rushkoff often portrays himself as the counter-culture heroically wise anti-hero.
    - 3y ago
mikewarot 3y ago
The data we're feeding to AI isn't us... it's us in our most "engaged" mode, deranged by the pressures of AI driven social media. It's a vicious cycle that isn't likely to end well. Imagine raising kids where they ONLY see you at your road-raging worst, every day, for their entire childhood, and never in any other setting. This is how we're "raising AI" to put it into his analogy.
- gsatic 3y ago
  Its all Ad Feuled content generation. It will end outside the US much faster cuz the Ad spends per person are much much lower. And therefore the polluted content too is much less. US advertising is a 350 Billion a Yr business. That's Not even counting political Ads. For comparison China is 150 billion UK is 45B and India is 15B. This is the Cost of Production of Info pollution. Cost of consumption can be seen in the Mental Health of all Americans. Americans don't realize how much their brains have been fucked up by marketing from birth. Now it's the AI brain getting fucked based on the same sewage. Other countries desperately want to be the next US. So the sooner they realize what the end state of runaway marketing/advertising funded Content does the more likely we will see drastic change to Information landscape
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    This is my main reservation against having kids... am I just providing more meat for the grinder? To see them sucked into the marketing machine at the age of 3. To bring others into a society that is fundamentally a little sick? It is my main issue but it is also the only thing that keeps me awake at night.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      I think most people just let themselves get sucked in though, you already seem aware enough to avoid it, so I don’t think you’re kids would be like that either. I have to say, I find America’s to have a lot of hyper gullible people as compared to other countries though and I do agree with you’re point.
gfodor 3y ago
It's really fascinating that our industry produces these kinds of bitter, cynical guys who are so brainwormed they talk in terms of ridiculous tribes like "tech bros" without realizing they're stereotyping people in a way nearly indistinguishable than the kinds of stereotyping that goes on in the minds of bigots. Yes, there have been waves of disruption over the last few decades where idealists have had all kinds of under-defined imaginary utopian concepts of where things ought to go with new media and new technology, and many of those things just didn't pan out. Sometimes it was due to capitalism, or stupidity, or the deficiencies of people in positions of power, but often when things fail due to capitalism after many attempts it's because people simply didn't want the thing once it was offered up. The good news is there is always another wave to catch and try again, try it differently, or try to simply correct what you feel went wrong. You can always tell when someone has flipped into becoming a poisoned cynic like this when they stop being cynical about the past and start being cynical about the uncharted future. I pray to God I go to my grave never being like this, it must be an absolutely miserable way to go through the world.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Conversely I find it fascinating that anyone with more than the briefest of exposure to our industry could continue to harbor any kind of naïve optimism in the face of the industry's multi-decade track record of consistently fucking up everything it touches, sometimes in ways so spectacular they just might be existential threats to our society.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Seriously? An existential threat to society? Taken literally there is a serious need for all involved to get a sense of proportion. Nuclear weaponry are an existential threat to societies. There are many far more terrible things which are not existential threats wars, coups, purges, and pandemics while horrible are not. The presumed tech demons of social media and big data don't even belong on the list. Taken metaphorically is this the new incarnation of the "ruining society" meme/rhetorical device after it got utterly discredited because society was already ruined by jazz music, women voting, women wearing pants, LGBT people existing in secrecy, rock music, metal, rap, LGBT people existing openly, and many more? If so it is just as insipid as its ancestors. I find the self-flagellation complex of claiming tech to be the well from which all sorrows are drawn, ruiner of the perfect Eden which existed before not only utterly stupid but downright tedious and tiresome.
js8 3y ago
Douglas Rushkoff was also recently interviewed by Sam Seder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS3-dQen-YM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS3-dQen-YM
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
mirpetri 3y ago
The author seems to be caught up in a dream. There is substantial criticism on technological "solutions" and the author fails to address those. Technology has been described as vicious circle previously as the problems it "solves" it (the technology) created in the first place, so it's not really going anywhere... and only grows (for its own sake?). Distinguished authors like Ted Kaczynski wrote on this.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  This is a theme you see around, we are creating techno solutions to problems, created by techno solutions - the real question is if we are happier now than in the past. It is debatable, empirically we have more than ever per individual and yet happiness is subjective. So long as we can keep going in that direction it should be alright. Right? It is similar to Ted K in that, yes, here is a whole lot of problems that the technological society have brought on. Cool, now what? I ain't going to do what Ted did and even then - the happiness question pops up - will it make us any happier to follow that path. I don't know but I have a feeling that it wouldn't help or hurt, we just have a default and go with that.
waihtis 3y ago
Starting your speech on a self-congratulatory snickering about tech bros throws all credibility out of the window
treelovinhippie 3y ago
[dead]
mif 3y ago
My big takeaway is his analogy of “read/write” and “read-only”. People and a society as a whole limits itself when you can’t participate in a genuine way. What comes to mind is the financial system, the political system(s), religion, and, actually, technology. Most of it can only be consumed and rewriting the rules is hard or almost impossible.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
HellDunkel 3y ago
Although partly funny (trashing techbros) i always end up feeling exhausted after these "tech"-talks. Is it fair to call him a tech-talker? If you are looking for the complete opposite you should consider this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6GIrCJY7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6GIrCJY7s (german only)
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Rushkoff has been raging against the machine since before the internet. You can tell whether something great is happening when it is accompanied by a Rushkoff counter-narrative.
troft 3y ago
[dead]
TacticalCoder 3y ago
"an MP3 is not a song. It is a numerical representation of a song algorithmically treated to make you ears think you're listening to music but you're not." This is spot on. And the lie kept being repeatedly sold by tech bros and streaming service who need to lower their cost as much as possible and are, in 2023, still unable to stream lossless music to their audience without losing too much money. And the tech bros, for the love of tech, keep explaining you how "you cannot tell the difference so you may as well listen to the lossy song instead of the lossless one". But why? Fuck no. Just no. Why the heck would I listen to a 320 kbps mp3 when I can have something simpler and unarguably more correct? Do I want to go to the Le Louvre museum and see a color print of Mona Lisa, made from a .jpg at 97% quality "because from 1 meter nobody can tell the difference"? For the love of tricking human's eye just as mp3 can trick human's ears? Just screw that mindset of disrespecting humans. Now a case could be made that "CD audio" ain't "human" either but the CD audio format was created in 1979 (?), then commercialized in the early 80s. This was way before the real tech abuse started. It's an incredibly well conceived format and it's all I need. "the original kind of tech bros science nerd need to separate from humanity and nature" They are tricksters. They want to trick my eyes and my ears for the love of Rube-Goldberg algorithms and the complexity deity. They want to trick me behaviorally. They need to sell me ads. They need to track me. I'm off ranting, I'll now go buy a few audio CDs. Early 80s tech, the best one.

87 points by blueridge 3y ago

What a fragging amazing treasure. Rushkoff has just gotten better and better over time, more and more on point. Humble fun opening: > I thought i was supposed to go out there to do this talk on the digital future & do this talk on the digital future - you know what I usually do -& just try to make people angry, you know- wealthy people upset by telling them people what this technology is for, and all that, and business plans are stupid, and killing the world.... Real talk middle, about the brutal indifferent stasism of AI: > The dataset on which we are feeding our ai's is us. Is what we are actually doing. We have created a situation where we have a generation of very powerful children learning how to be, based on how we are. > The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves.

ggm 3y ago
> The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves. I dunno, wasn't Saint Augustine "lord make me good, but not yet" pretty much admitting that our heroes have feet of clay, and yet they function as educators and leaders. If you modulate the training set through externally derived axioms of good and bad, can't you train an AI on objectively naughty data to recognise the anti-set of good behaviour?
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  Do we WANT the AI judging us as good / bad?
  - rektide 3y ago
    A major thread through the talk is that there are powers that be that think they have the answers & want to shape & mold us. Not super clearly stated, but implicitly said, it rarely works & the hubris almost always causes huge problems, is a projection rather than what the world wants or needs. If AI is judging us, it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris filled megalomaniacs. The rest of humanity doesn't really have/isn't permitted much of a say in the matter.
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      > it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris My argument would be this is both likely and inevitable where there AI is used as a judge. OpenAI, for example, has material explaining how they prune and curate their datasets to alter it's biases.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  The issue of what is good or bad is all a matter of perspective though. On the extreme end of this is - What one side considered a terrorist, the other considers them a liberating warrior. That is easy at that scale but the finer grain you go on morals the more fuzzy it gets and the more push back you will get from all directions. This is how you get things like the 1946 Obscenity threshold of "I know it when I see it". Many saw the 2008 crash as a major issue that destroyed the lives of millions of people, some hard line environmentalists saw it as the single great decrease in consumption we have ever had.
wpietri 3y ago
"I don't necessarily like tech bros but I like talking with tech bros and at tech bros because they're easy to upset. The main way you upset them is by asserting either their humanity or everyone else's humanity." Ok, this is now on my watchlist. Such a good summation.
- peepeepoopoo15 3y ago
  [flagged]
- freetime2 3y ago
  I don't think that making denigrating remarks about any group of people (even "tech bros") is a good way to start a talk. It signals to me that the speaker is more interested in identity politics, pitting "us" against "them" because that's what seems to hold peoples' attention these days, rather than serious solutions.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - camillomiller 3y ago
    Yeah, that’s what a techbro would say
    - corinroyal 3y ago
      LMFAO!
    - tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
      And this, folks, is how you get techbros.
  - partomniscient 3y ago
    Rushkoff often portrays himself as the counter-culture heroically wise anti-hero.
  - 3y ago

mikewarot 3y ago

The data we're feeding to AI isn't us... it's us in our most "engaged" mode, deranged by the pressures of AI driven social media. It's a vicious cycle that isn't likely to end well. Imagine raising kids where they ONLY see you at your road-raging worst, every day, for their entire childhood, and never in any other setting. This is how we're "raising AI" to put it into his analogy.

gsatic 3y ago
Its all Ad Feuled content generation. It will end outside the US much faster cuz the Ad spends per person are much much lower. And therefore the polluted content too is much less. US advertising is a 350 Billion a Yr business. That's Not even counting political Ads. For comparison China is 150 billion UK is 45B and India is 15B. This is the Cost of Production of Info pollution. Cost of consumption can be seen in the Mental Health of all Americans. Americans don't realize how much their brains have been fucked up by marketing from birth. Now it's the AI brain getting fucked based on the same sewage. Other countries desperately want to be the next US. So the sooner they realize what the end state of runaway marketing/advertising funded Content does the more likely we will see drastic change to Information landscape
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  This is my main reservation against having kids... am I just providing more meat for the grinder? To see them sucked into the marketing machine at the age of 3. To bring others into a society that is fundamentally a little sick? It is my main issue but it is also the only thing that keeps me awake at night.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    I think most people just let themselves get sucked in though, you already seem aware enough to avoid it, so I don’t think you’re kids would be like that either. I have to say, I find America’s to have a lot of hyper gullible people as compared to other countries though and I do agree with you’re point.

gfodor 3y ago

It's really fascinating that our industry produces these kinds of bitter, cynical guys who are so brainwormed they talk in terms of ridiculous tribes like "tech bros" without realizing they're stereotyping people in a way nearly indistinguishable than the kinds of stereotyping that goes on in the minds of bigots. Yes, there have been waves of disruption over the last few decades where idealists have had all kinds of under-defined imaginary utopian concepts of where things ought to go with new media and new technology, and many of those things just didn't pan out. Sometimes it was due to capitalism, or stupidity, or the deficiencies of people in positions of power, but often when things fail due to capitalism after many attempts it's because people simply didn't want the thing once it was offered up. The good news is there is always another wave to catch and try again, try it differently, or try to simply correct what you feel went wrong. You can always tell when someone has flipped into becoming a poisoned cynic like this when they stop being cynical about the past and start being cynical about the uncharted future. I pray to God I go to my grave never being like this, it must be an absolutely miserable way to go through the world.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
Conversely I find it fascinating that anyone with more than the briefest of exposure to our industry could continue to harbor any kind of naïve optimism in the face of the industry's multi-decade track record of consistently fucking up everything it touches, sometimes in ways so spectacular they just might be existential threats to our society.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Seriously? An existential threat to society? Taken literally there is a serious need for all involved to get a sense of proportion. Nuclear weaponry are an existential threat to societies. There are many far more terrible things which are not existential threats wars, coups, purges, and pandemics while horrible are not. The presumed tech demons of social media and big data don't even belong on the list. Taken metaphorically is this the new incarnation of the "ruining society" meme/rhetorical device after it got utterly discredited because society was already ruined by jazz music, women voting, women wearing pants, LGBT people existing in secrecy, rock music, metal, rap, LGBT people existing openly, and many more? If so it is just as insipid as its ancestors. I find the self-flagellation complex of claiming tech to be the well from which all sorrows are drawn, ruiner of the perfect Eden which existed before not only utterly stupid but downright tedious and tiresome.

js8 3y ago

Douglas Rushkoff was also recently interviewed by Sam Seder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS3-dQen-YM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS3-dQen-YM

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

mirpetri 3y ago

The author seems to be caught up in a dream. There is substantial criticism on technological "solutions" and the author fails to address those. Technology has been described as vicious circle previously as the problems it "solves" it (the technology) created in the first place, so it's not really going anywhere... and only grows (for its own sake?). Distinguished authors like Ted Kaczynski wrote on this.

NovaDudely 3y ago
This is a theme you see around, we are creating techno solutions to problems, created by techno solutions - the real question is if we are happier now than in the past. It is debatable, empirically we have more than ever per individual and yet happiness is subjective. So long as we can keep going in that direction it should be alright. Right? It is similar to Ted K in that, yes, here is a whole lot of problems that the technological society have brought on. Cool, now what? I ain't going to do what Ted did and even then - the happiness question pops up - will it make us any happier to follow that path. I don't know but I have a feeling that it wouldn't help or hurt, we just have a default and go with that.

waihtis 3y ago

Starting your speech on a self-congratulatory snickering about tech bros throws all credibility out of the window

treelovinhippie 3y ago

[dead]

mif 3y ago

My big takeaway is his analogy of “read/write” and “read-only”. People and a society as a whole limits itself when you can’t participate in a genuine way. What comes to mind is the financial system, the political system(s), religion, and, actually, technology. Most of it can only be consumed and rewriting the rules is hard or almost impossible.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

HellDunkel 3y ago

Although partly funny (trashing techbros) i always end up feeling exhausted after these "tech"-talks. Is it fair to call him a tech-talker? If you are looking for the complete opposite you should consider this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6GIrCJY7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6GIrCJY7s (german only)

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Rushkoff has been raging against the machine since before the internet. You can tell whether something great is happening when it is accompanied by a Rushkoff counter-narrative.

troft 3y ago

[dead]

TacticalCoder 3y ago

"an MP3 is not a song. It is a numerical representation of a song algorithmically treated to make you ears think you're listening to music but you're not." This is spot on. And the lie kept being repeatedly sold by tech bros and streaming service who need to lower their cost as much as possible and are, in 2023, still unable to stream lossless music to their audience without losing too much money. And the tech bros, for the love of tech, keep explaining you how "you cannot tell the difference so you may as well listen to the lossy song instead of the lossless one". But why? Fuck no. Just no. Why the heck would I listen to a 320 kbps mp3 when I can have something simpler and unarguably more correct? Do I want to go to the Le Louvre museum and see a color print of Mona Lisa, made from a .jpg at 97% quality "because from 1 meter nobody can tell the difference"? For the love of tricking human's eye just as mp3 can trick human's ears? Just screw that mindset of disrespecting humans. Now a case could be made that "CD audio" ain't "human" either but the CD audio format was created in 1979 (?), then commercialized in the early 80s. This was way before the real tech abuse started. It's an incredibly well conceived format and it's all I need. "the original kind of tech bros science nerd need to separate from humanity and nature" They are tricksters. They want to trick my eyes and my ears for the love of Rube-Goldberg algorithms and the complexity deity. They want to trick me behaviorally. They need to sell me ads. They need to track me. I'm off ranting, I'll now go buy a few audio CDs. Early 80s tech, the best one.