Raúl Zibechi: Algorithms have no life of their own

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To massification of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the naturalization of its results does not go hand in hand with an understanding of its mechanisms, who promote it, with what interests and objectives. If we do not do this exercise, we will be passive victims of modes that we do not know.

In recent interview the historian and philosopher Yuval Harari argues that AI allows a total surveillance that ends with any freedom (https://goo.su/bndfi4r). It warns that surveillance capacity exceeds that of any dictatorship or totalitarian regime, since through surveillance chambers with facial recognition capacity and cell phones, it has the ability to control the slightest attitudes of all people in Everywhere where the Internet arrives.

Personally, I have proven that they send me advertising of products or brands of which I am talking to my family and friends, almost immediately. We know that AI allows any conversation to be heard through cell phones, however intimate, all movement and communication we do.

Harari says that AI is different from any previously invented technologybecause unlike previous technologies, it is not in the hands of human beings nor is it a tool that must be activated by people, but An independent agent that has the ability to make their own decisions by itself. Maintains that in the media, that They integrate the basis of a large -scale democracyit is no longer the editors who make editorial decisions, but It is the algorithms that decide what the recommended story should be.

I think that many of Harari’s arguments are interesting and that their complaint of the massive manipulation of information is very important. Take a step even more, to deepen the consequences of AI: “The algorithms of the companies have discovered that we must spread Fake News And theories that increase the doses of hatred, fear and anger in users, because this makes people involve, it is more time on the platforms and sends links so that their friends can also get angry and be afraid. ”

Concludes that this is a business model because User involvement is the basis of everythingso that the time that each user passes on the platforms leads to companies to win more money, because they sell more ads and, above all, They collect data that will later sell to third parties. A very interesting analysis, which ends with a devastating phrase: The people of the sector are trapped in an armed career mentality of competitors, and not to be won.

I think, however, that two aspects are missing to complete the picture because, if not, you can lose the context of what is truly happening: the first is that algorithms have no life of their own, but have been created by the system To improve your profits, deepening the control of our minds. The second is that the history of capitalism is precisely this.

When Harari argues that AI makes decisions for itself, this is only partially true if we look only at technology but not those who created it and handle it to know still the deepest desires of people.

Secondly, we must go back to the history of Panoptic, Taylorism and Fordism to see how the control of capitalism has been deepened.

The panoptic arises in the armies. Soldiers’ campaign stores should be rigorously aligned for officers to detect the least movement. Then he moved to prisons, hospitals, teaching centers, factories; Always to limit people’s autonomy. The cameras that multiply in our cities have the same goal.

In the factories, in the manufacturing period, the specialized worker controlled the machines and their working times. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Scientific Work Organization Designed by Frederick Taylor, who divided the tasks between those who execute movements and those who plan and give orders. The goal was to make the worker a Gorilla Amaestradosubject to machines, capable of making precise and timed movements.

With the assembly chain created in Ford factories, a first control cycle of workers’ control is closed, then deepened with the Toyotismwhen the workers managed to neutralize the previous mode of exploitation, in the decade of labor struggles of 1960.

The improvement of technologies for the control of life, nature and everything human, is the hallmark of capitalism. In this way it increases their profits, subjecting more and more to human beings. New and more sophisticated forms of control will emerge, because those below always find ways to resist and mock those above.