The British SF writer Charles Stross once noticed a similarity between the existential horrors populating the works of HP Lovecraft and the Cold War nation states. Godlike uncaring entities vying for power and dominance with little regard for the other creatures inhabiting the universe.
The result of this insight resulted in an ongoing book series called the Laundry Files, a mixture of spycraft (down and dirty espionage along the lines of John Le Carre) and Lovecraftian horrors from Beyond all embedded in the usual governmental bureaucracy.
Separately, Mr. Stross has often complained about how reality is always nipping at his heels when it comes to near future fiction. Lately he has been complaining about how current affairs are increasingly looking like the macabre fictions of his Laundry Files. Our government is increasingly looking like a Lovecraftian horror. I would go a step further and suggest that perhaps Mr. Stross is manifesting his own work.
It reminds me of a casual observation I made between the Marvel Cinematic Universe stories about Thor the God of Thunder and my own situation. In one movie, Thor loses an eye. I lose an eye. His compatriot Valkyrie loses a kidney. I lose a kidney. Please, writers of the MCU, stop maiming me.
Mr. Stross produced a novel which posited that the US Government was now possessed by Cthulhu, and I can't untangle this from our current administration. An idiot god ready to consume his humans just to be in charge of the world, or our portion of it. So I am putting out a special plea to Mr. Stross to stop, just stop. While we are all of us still here.
Of course this is sillinesss and yet there is truth to the idea of governmental and corporate superorganisms as massive slow AIs having little regard for the people that consitute them.
I am currently reading Empire Of AI by Karen Hao. I've skimmed through the sections about the big players and personalities involved in the development of AI and their power stuggles because these are boring people. Interchangeable personalities spouting equally boring bullshit. (No question, there is a ton of money in Narrow AI, but these people aren't helping any in their quest for AGI).
I'm much more concerned about the chapters that point out the disaster capitalism involved in using up resources and energy in pursuing AI models, the massive criminal theft of creative works used in loading up these stochastic parrots, and the horrific stories of gig workers in the Global South who are both exploited and traumatized by cleaning data of all the really terrible things that humans can do to each other. (Facebook is guilty AF when it comes abusing workers to "sanitize" content).
It would seem that the human operators of corporations eventually are subsumed by the objective functions of the massive slow AIs they work for. Note how Google went from Don't Be Evil to Enshittify Everything and the human personaliies merely rationalize the corporate behavior with a shrug of dismissal and buy another superyacht.
Unfortunately, the current US administration has embraced the notion of running government like a business with the predictable fucked up results.
I think there is another way to resolve this still before we are all drowned in AI slop and the return of feudalism. The late great David Graeber once correctly noticed that in the private sector, 90% of the service industry jobs were actually care jobs. Not only were the best performers approaching their tasks from a care standpoint, they were also practicing the concept of no bullshit.
My brother E William once told me that he would accompany our dad, a salesman of medical monitoring devices, would often strike out on sales calls at universities and hospitals. At one convention, a biology professor tried to play my dad against a rival salesman from a competing company. That salesman promised the professor that his machines could do all sorts of things. The salesman was blowing smoke up the professor's ass. Dad was honest and said his machines couldn't do what the professor wanted, and lost the bid. But a year later, the professor called him and bought a dozen devices which produced a very nice commision indeed. Dad's moral of the story: Don't Bullshit or you will eventually be found out.
Point being Dad was not operating as a salesman trying to score a sale, but rather as a care giver identifying the needs of the customer and providing a solution to the need. I've seen this in exceptional people again and again in the service industry. Retail clerks, mechanics, you name it, they all act more like doctors and nurses to provide the need. Cost isn't secondary, but profit is. The profit is getting a bee back with the hive. The profit, many times over, but tertiary, is a productive bee.
Nowadays, in the for-profit healthcare industry, the unfortunate tendency is to bullshit to make a profit. That is not a good care strategy and people only get pissed off and cynical. But if we go back to, yes, losing money but increasing quality of life, we actually make a profit through good care. Export that model and things get better.
It's a stupidly simple change, but it seems to work over and over. Maybe it is not too late.
Other things. We poured bronze. Mine came through and I got it all cleaned up and done quickly for a change.
This piece, tentatively titled Zuon, is part of a series of sculptures where I asked the question How will humans treat aliens/AI/robots if we are on kind of an equal level. The answer was treat them like animals. Not always good. Sometimes bad.
