Comment by aspenmayer
1 day ago
We expect tools to follow orders, or they are replaced with one that will. We expect those with agency to disobey unjust orders, yet our tools will always be tools. It’s an accountability dodge that just might pay dividends.
Agree the accountability dodge is absolutely a thing. Agree that the tendency is there to try to replace anything that might say no (why do you think capitalists are drooling over AI in the first place)?
The paying dividends bit is exactly what society can't afford to cut the psychopaths at the top loose with. The only counterbalance against that rank psychopathy is the fact they'd have to have moral buy in from the people doing the work to implement, giving a de facto check on their power. Remove that element, remove the check.
> Remove that element, remove the check.
I agree all around, but/and:
Dividends will be collected by the ones who write such checks; we’ll all pay, as the institutional buy-in has already been priced in.
This is all a meandering way of saying something better quoted in full, so I shall do so below [sic]:
> Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde