Dimitris Giantzis
Most Marxists as well as progressive anti-systemic intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and his fellow academics are particularly wary of the advance of next-generation artificial intelligence. As N. Chomsky notes, that students instinctively use high technology to avoid learning is “a sign that the education system has failed.” If ChatGPT can instantly produce a persuasive academic paper on any topic, then what future might there be for academic papers themselves?
The same concern exists for journalism, which already constitutes to a large extent “regurgitation” of information that is already available on the internet. This year, in early March, Noam Chomsky, together with linguist Ian Roberts and Geoffrey Waitmill, director of Artificial Intelligence at a technology company, published an article in the New York Times rejecting the theory that the future lies in such “learning machines”. As they emphasize, the new technology, on the one hand, creates optimism, on the other, it causes concern and fear that the most popular and modern strain of AI (machine learning) will degrade our science and our ethics, by building into our technology a fundamentally flawed understanding of language and knowledge. They note that “it is both comical and tragic that so much money and so much attention is focused on something so small” and something so insignificant in contrast to the human mind, which, because of language, can make “infinite use of finite means”, creating ideas and theories with universal scope. Their conclusion is that the predictions of machine learning systems will always be superficial and questionable.
The gurus of Silicon Valley, however, dream of “Mars colonies” and look to the development of artificial intelligence as a lifeline from the new capitalist and banking crisis that can lead to a new investment boom.
Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who is trying to reverse the decline of Tesla and Space X shares, notes that the scary thing regarding new technology is that it’s already so good. The eternal confrontation between capital’s immediate use of – still unreliable – artificial intelligence to eliminate jobs and boost profitability and the struggle to turn new technology into a tool for the benefit of workers is expected to seal the new era.
Posted on BEFORE on 03-24-2023