Museum vs precarity is not the only choice
My plans for today include a walk past the Musée d’Orsay, one of the myriad museums dotted around my adopted hometown of Paris. It’s unlikely that I’ll go in, sadly: the queues are too long, and I have work to be getting on with.
Despite how it may appear to tourists, Paris is not frozen in aspic; in fact the city is vibrant and alive, home to all of the highs and lows of a major capital city, with the lows including paying bills, crowded metro carriages and, well, work.
I am not the only person with museums on my mind, though. Speaking to the Irish Times, Erin Egan, chief privacy officer at Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Whatsapp, said Europe’s risk-averse response to technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) could see it become the “museum of the world”.
The problem? Regulation, she said. The answer? “Removing regulatory hurdles” to allow innovative start-ups to flourish. And yet, ŧhis “is not about deregulation”.
Likewise, Guillaume Princen, a former Stripe executive now heading up AI company Anthropic’s European operations, told the Business Post something similar: “I think we need innovation in Europe. I think we need those firms to thrive, I think we need these companies to reinvent themselves,” Princen said, speaking at this week’s Dublin Web Summit.
None of this is, in itself, particularly egregious. Indeed, this very column is itself often long on verbiage about how Europe dropped the IT and computing ball decades ago. Nevertheless, there is, or at least should be, more to technology than data harvesting, subscriptions and apps.
Egan appears to see the problem as a question of ‘who speaks?’: “It is part of an attempt by a vocal minority of activist groups to delay AI innovation in the EU and that ultimately harms consumers and businesses who can benefit from these technologies,” she said, going on to say their “arguments were wrong on the facts and they’re wrong on the law.”
Soi-disant ‘activist groups’, this strongly implies, are impeding natural progress by pushing an agenda. Naturally, profit-making operations never push an agenda, which is why, as we know, political lobbying does not exist and think-tanks are not funded by businesses.
But let’s just put that aside and think for a moment. Claims that Europe is destined to become a museum are over the top. Besides which, if the choice is museum or precarious dystopia in which employees are utterly beholden to employers and consumers at the mercy of giant corporate edifices, then so be it; the museum sounds pretty good to me.
Besides, demands that the EU cut back on regulations are kicking at an open door, if comments from officials ranging from former ECB governor Mario Draghi to European Commission vice president for technological sovereignty Henna Virkkunen are anything to go by.
Define ‘progress’
The endless demands that we strip away rights, culture and, ultimately, even a way of life that doesn’t involve long, unproductive hours and the threat of crushing medical debt in the name of ‘progress’ (which has been redefined to mean little more than dopey apps intended to extract money and harvest data) need to stop.
AI is not uninteresting, and it is not useless either, but it has a number of serious problems. Leaving aside concerns about creators’ rights (and, yes, we are leaving a lot aside today, aren’t we?), not only has AI been deployed at a time when technology businesses have become comically voracious, it also simply costs too damn much to run.
In light of this, OpenAI’s $6.5 billion (€5.74bn) purchase of ‘third device’ hardware start-up Io, founded by Apple’s former industrial designer Jonathan Ive, seems more like a desperate bid to create hype around the company’s valuation than a realistic plan to create a hardware revolution on a par with the development of smartphones.
Meanwhile, back here on planet pleb, the push for digital transformation has run up against the fact that, increasingly, the state into which the world is being transformed looks more and more like feudalism. It makes sense, I suppose: capitalism, as Henry Ford realised, demands both workers and consumers, and all the better if these are the self-same people. Today, however, speculators (don’t call these people investors, because that is not what is going on here) have funnelled an unimaginable amount of money into a technology that they openly hope puts vast swathes of people out of work.
I do not know if this will or will not happen, but I do know one thing: more and more people to whom I speak are sick and tired of mediating their lives though technology that is continually, and intentionally, degraded in the name of increasing profits, and, arguably even worse, is forcing computational thinking on people desperately in need of a more humanistic experience.
Tech fatigue is no longer the sole preserve of bored and tired BOFHs or pensioners befuddled by online services (incidentally, no small issue). Why are we sick of tech? It’s simple, really: too narrow a definition of technology has been applied, and too much juice has been squeezed. I’m off to walk by the museum now. Maybe I will go in, after all.
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