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Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
The Overstory
Richard Powers
Laboring in noisy environments, watched over by managers and supervisors, workers had access to language only in their breaks, in the toilet, at the end of the working day, or when they were engaged in sabotage, because communication interrupted production. But in post-Fordism, when the assembly line becomes a ‘flux of information’, people work by communicating. As Norbert Wiener taught, communication and control entail one another.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
Yet Colossus only beat us at one task; according to Bengio, “superhuman” AI will beat us at a “vast array of tasks.” But that assumes being human is to be nothing more than a particularly *versatile* task-completion machine. Once you accept that devastating reduction of the scope of our humanity, the production of an equivalently versatile task-machine with “superhuman” task performance doesn’t seem so far-fetched; the notion is almost mundane.
The Danger of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think
Shannon Vallor
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