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That seems like a concise summary of what the AI hype is mainly about: eliminating local knowledge. Like “the builders of the modern nation-state,” AI makers intend not to “merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and a landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.” They try to create a world seen as fully quantifiable — “a slide-rule authoritarianism,” to borrow Scott’s phrase — and impossible to understand in any other way — a world in which we can only make data and not decisions. AI systems are thus optimized for dependency.
The Slovenly Wilderness
Rob Horning
Where we start to move forward is when we learn to ask questions which are less concerned with ‘Are you like us?’, and more interested in ‘What is it like to be you?’
Ways of Being
James Bridle
We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials,’ and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more powerful technologically and more brutal.
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
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