Comment by huurtehoog
2 days ago
Text renderer, whatever. Doesn't matter how you think of them, they are very interesting technology that is being misused and misconstrued in the name of something that has nothing to do with technology: political economy.
The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was making us think that the economy is about technology, and not politics.
Sure, politics and economics are involved - but why can’t technology also play an important role?
None of this AI political economy stuff was relevant in 2015 because necessary technological breakthroughs had not yet been made.
Computers have been at the center of civilization and politics since they helped win a war by changing intelligence work forever in WWII.
The idea that some new thing was born with LLMs and that this new thing fundamentally changes the calculus from the politics of labor and wealth into a technical discussion of possibilities and constraints determined by what the machine is and can do, and not what people should do, is yet another political play. It is always political, it is never moved beyond politics into technology, no matter how much technology changes.
Not true, it is usually technology that changes politics and not the other way round (though it is reflexive in practice).
The type of politics possible under agriculture is different from one in industrial age.
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