Starmer was dragged out to promote AI as hasty cover for his administration’s failings, and said exactly what he was expected to
~ Tabitha Troughton ~
A vast, flashy, rapacious, multi-tentacled parasite swarms the planet, embedding itself ever deeper into the collective psyche. There’s nowhere, it seems, it won’t go; from genocidal mass assassinations and deepfaking far-right propaganda, to a toe-curlingly obsequious interview with a Polish writer. In return, it’s set to suck up as much clean water annually as Denmark, and, in Europe alone, is predicted to demand as much energy as Portugal, Greece, and the Netherlands combined. Morgan Stanley report it will release the equivalent of 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by the end of the decade, more than the international aviation industry. It also produces other toxic waste.
This thing is known as “Artificial Intelligence”. Its very shapelessness, its inability to be pinned down, or generally understood, is one of its strengths, but then the term itself is an oxymoron. And, as the linguist Richard Watson Todd pointed out: “the true beauty of oxymorons is that, unless we sit back and really think, we happily accept them as normal English.”
Intelligence is sentience; the awareness and presence of feelings, emotions and sensations, combined with, in various degrees, the ability to judge, rationalise, study, anticipate, or react. Intelligence is alive. Humans have intelligence. Other animals have intelligence. It can be argued that plants have it.
AI is, effectively, a computer. And a computer does not have intelligence. It is not alive. It does not feel. Nor does it dream, hate, get bored, or love. A computer can only copy. It can do so because it has originally been programmed, by humans, to do so. But AI reproducing the sound of laughter is not laughing, any more than a tape-recorder did.
The ”intelligence” behind AI is not artificial, but human, and a particular kind of human, at that. We cannot blame hunks of machinery for the prospect of perpetual, universal AI surveillance, enthusiastically promoted by former CIA collaborator, and current director of software corporation Oracle, Larry Ellison. We cannot blame a computer for being programmed to suggest death targets, or made to produce an image of Nigel Farage surrounded by lions: in many human hands, the result of the latter would be significantly more bloody, in fact. “We’re not doing this. It’s the thing we own and programme which is doing this”, the people behind it shrug. Or, alternatively: “cheer up, this thing will solve all the environmental problems it’s exacerbating!” Or: “Hah, you fools, can’t you see this thing will create jobs despite being actually designed to replace them?”
Billions upon billions are now being poured into AI across the planet. In the US, half a trillion dollars are about to be invested in Project Stargate, via a joint venture with Oracle, OpenAI (part-owned by Microsoft), and SoftBank. The new AI data centres’ enormous levels of energy consumption will come as scientists warn of “soaring energy demands and unprecedented heatwaves” which have “placed the US on the brink of a severe threat with the potential to impact millions of lives”, while their exorbitant water usage will increase in a country already facing multiple and increasing fresh water crises.
AI “will provide solutions to the biggest challenges facing humanity and the planet”, burbled the introduction to Keir Starmer last week. Starmer had been dragged out to promote AI as hasty cover for his own administration’s appalling policies, and like most people tempted by power, greed or desperation, said exactly what he was expected to. “We have to look at it through the lens of opportunity” the current prime minister instructed the country. Britain, he told us, was going to devote itself to becoming “one of the great AI superpowers”. It will be “the global race of our lives”.
Starmer was bad. But worse was the ever-present spectre of his mentor, Tony Blair, who, the previous July, had capered across the Tony Blair Institute stage, dressed in black and white, like a malevolent colobus, and exhorted the world to embrace AI, fixing his audience with a death stare through eyes so dark and cold they had to have been sourced here. Blair’s son currently makes a living, or rather, enormous losses, from his own AI company, it seems, but the media were largely too polite to mention it.
Just as they were too polite to mention the reality of a world and people razed to rubble which blackens Starmer’s every move. Israel’s genocidal war, in which Starmer and his administration are complicit, was made more inhuman, less intelligent and more unaccountable by the deliberate, human use of AI programmes which suggested which Palestinian families should be killed, while US tech corporations provide wholehearted and ongoing AI support to the Israeli government and military. Israel is now “a global leader in Applied AI innovation” Forbes reports, which is one way of putting it.
Still, as Starmer throws the UK open to more corporate destruction and exploitation, blathering crazily about the government being “emboldened to take risks as our brilliant entrepreneurs do, restless and relentless” and assuring the tech oligarchs that he will “remove the blockages (regulations) that hold you back”, the Chinese have just scuppered the West by releasing an open source AI model which rivals OpenAI models like ChatGPT and can be used for “free”.
People have already checked: it refuses to talk about Tiananmen Square.
Image: AIEASE.ai
