musage

> Since, however, men are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion. Public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality through sheer addition. All the so-called liberal concepts of politics (that is, all the pre-imperialist political notions of the bourgeoisie)-such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of "enlightened self-interest" as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events -have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics. Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie's instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the new class's faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle. The old standards give way to the extent that automatically growing wealth actually replaces political action.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

> Apart from my tech criticism, what I notice about reading those links is the very detached, indifferent, irresponsible, even COLD attitude from everybody involved in cheering on this experimental AI algorithm -- from the Google research authors, the Tubefilter authors and commenters there and in the Y Combinator discussion. While a few people complain about their music choices or political videos, or how they can make money from the new algorithm -- most of them don’t think ahead about consequences, or about other people at all. They should have just kept their experiment in the laboratory.

> Nobody discussed how the gimmicky algorithm would affect real people or ruin cultures around the world. Nobody there, in all seriousness, “thought of the children”. Now we, here, are discussing and solving THEIR industrial fallout, like factory pollution spread over a community. This is why James Bridle’s timely article was so essential to identify “infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects”.

> In my opinion, the negligent people who gave the green light to this untested algorithm or cheered it on are, in fact, responsible accomplices to infrastructural violence. And the violence is real. Their "Frankenstein AI" foolishly recommended toxic movies that harmed millions of children (and adults). The AI cheerleaders felt no hesitation to exert control over what billions of people watch and think, in a very sneaky way -- while allowing greedy marketers to manipulate their choices to make ad money, and allowing sinister pervs to groom the children watching those badly recommended movies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7ebw14/reverse_engineering_the_youtube_algorithm/dq3v7jp/