Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Capitalism What does Eric Hobsbawm mean by “human beings are efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production”? Eric Hobsbawm, a prominent Marxist historian, discusses how human beings, in his view, are shaped and adapted to fit into capitalist economic systems. His statement implies that capitalism, with its emphasis on competition, efficiency, and profit-seeking, tends to reward certain behaviors and attributes that humans naturally possess or can develop. These include qualities like ambition, productivity, and a willingness to innovate and adapt to market demands. From Hobsbawm's perspective, capitalism harnesses human creativity and productivity through market mechanisms like supply and demand, private ownership of means of production, and the pursuit of profit. He suggests that these economic structures align with basic human instincts and capabilities, making capitalism a system that can effectively utilize human labor and ingenuity to drive economic growth and dev...

 

I hadn't realised I “ signed up to work on code that directly powers war crimes" . 

“ By broadening who and what constitutes a military target, mass killings take place under the guise of legal and strategic necessity. Arguably, the fastest way to turn civilians into combatants and civilian infrastructure, such as bakeries, into military bases on a massive scale is through the use of AI.” “[F]or the first time, the army's AI systems are allowing it to generate new targets faster than it can strike them. He noted that in the 2014 and 2021 wars, the IDF had exhausted its list of targets. Previously, finding and justifying new targets seemed to be a bottleneck in Israeli military operations.” Like competition in the ‘free market’, a capitalist has to tap well for a new niche even when the market is ‘saturated’. “The question is not whether AI is good or bad for war, or whether it could be refined to be fairer. The bias in the ‘target factory’ is a political one, pre-existing the elaboration of its data models: that international law integrates an economy of violence ...

Abetting genocide?

“Rather than making work easier or more rewarding, we expect the development and application of new technologies, particularly in the areas of automation, computation and artificial intelligence,   to disempower us .” “In a world where the vast majority of us are  compelled to work in order to live , the future of work matters – which is to say: workers matter…  In a word, they [workers] are free , and by their most basic and human capacity for autonomy introduce uncertainty into a finely calibrated calculus for making money.” (My emphasis N.M.) As far as I can understand there is a contradiction. The word ‘free’ is not even in inverted commas.

“Chomsky and his coauthors argue that machine learning  — the discipline behind generative AI and other powerful algorithms — will ‘degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.’ Chomsky has been fighting against this particular conception since the 1950s, so it’s not a surprise that he thinks it’s problematic for it to be released commercially. It’s less clear that his particular blend of cognitive science and politics can truly account for what ChatGPT and similar systems are up to . A competing  op-ed  from the  Wall Street Journal  penned by now deceased Henry Kissinger — a generational Chomsky nemesis — and coauthors argued that ChatGPT was as important a step as the printing press, with similarly wide-ranging implications for policy, foreign and domestic, and the status of knowledge. In a weird way, Chomsky actually agrees with t...

Page is worth $120 billion. He is co-founder if Google, former manager of Alphabet and currently controlling shareholder. Nick Bilton: Larry Page was talking about the progression of technology and how it was inevitable that humans would eventually create “superintelligent machines,” also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), which are computers that are smarter than humans, and in Page’s view, once that happened, those machines would quickly find no use for us humans, and they would simply get rid of us. “What do you mean, get rid of us?” my friend asked Page. Like a sci-fi writer delivering a pitch for their new apocalyptic story idea, Page explained that these robots would become far superior to us very quickly , and if we were no longer needed on earth and that’s the natural order of things—and I quote—“it’s just the next step in evolution.” At first my friend assumed Page was joking. “I’m serious,” said Page. When my friend argued that this was a really fucked up way of ...

Related Intersectional struggles against big tech and Israeli apartheid

There is a focus on capitalism in the UK .  I don’t understand what Michael Roberts means by three socio-economic systems. Is it not capitalism the socio-economic system of our era?

This is very stimulating and requires focus, and the exchanges are also very engaging. I couldn’t read everything although the topic is so important to most of us. 

“It would take human jobs faster than the Kardashians ‘dump boyfriends’.”

Davos and the ‘liberal order’

Behind Trump's trade war The AI arms race Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read this FT article.