The current fad of AI quibbling strongly resembles Walker Percy’s smartphone apocalypse in ‘Love in the Ruins’, the perfect dystopia for our times, written in 1971. The devil invents a little hand-carried imaginator that can see into everyone’s head. He distributes a bunch of them for free, then watches the accusations turn into a war.
I think something else is going on here.
The tech lords have already destroyed the value of physical creation by sending it all to China. Old story.
They’re currently destroying the value of mental creation with AI witch wars and cybersecurity wars.
New thought: They’re also degrading the importance of actual money used for exchanging both kinds of work. The only money they want is the pure abstraction of Share Value, which can’t be used by peasants to pay for things.
FACT: BOTS DO NOT PAY OR RECEIVE MONEY. HUMANS DO.
Money is the only test you need.
Bitcoin was the first volley in this war. Bitcoin cultists dismissed all real spendable money as fake. Only the unspendable money inside the Holy Blockchain is real.
The new AI and cybersecurity wars attack money from another angle.
1. Most obviously, AI doesn’t pay for its raw material. Real factories and stores pay for their iron and wheat and wood. Real publishers pay for copyrights and pay reporters to write stories. AI simply steals everything.
2. Canvas locked me out of a paid subscription because I don’t own an imaginator. My $3600 a year doesn’t count as money. Only hardwiring your brain to the imaginator counts as money.
3. Within Substack it’s easy to tell who’s real and who isn’t. The management has even provided a handy measuring tool, a little flower-like mark of subscriptions. If you have a flower you’re a paying customer. The witch hunters are ignoring the simple test of physicality, using their devil-supplied Pangram imaginators to imagine what someone else is doing. (Percy would have loved the name Pangram with its double echo of Pan and Pentagram.)
4. Facebook is trying to clean out bots, which is a good thing in general. Before the current AI bots, Facebook was already infested by India call-center bots. But Facebook is NOT using money to determine who’s a bot. A real newspaper was kicked out because it didn’t pass the AI-tested AI witch test. The paper had hundreds of paying Facebook subscribers, which Facebook itself obviously knew. Because the paper was bringing in money, it was prima facie human, and it was also A SOURCE OF PROFIT FOR FACEBOOK.
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As I’ve been saying for 20 years, modern corporations DON’T WANT PROFIT. Profit is the worst thing in the world. Profit is contaminated by passing through the stinky hands and filthy accounts of Meat Objects. Profit destroys your purely abstract Holy Share Value.
Polistra's Mill 