Here are a few notes from this talk at UBC’s Chan Centre with Karen Hao and Naomi Klein. Despite the overwhelming scope of the damage Big Tech is doing, I came away genuinely hopeful for the opportunities there are to do things differently and regain our agency in life and creativity and business and everything.

1. We need to resist the narrative that progress requires exponential scale – the idea that this hyperscaling, extractive path to beneficial AI tools is inevitable. It’s a religious belief propagated by some executives and repeated by people excited about ideas like AGI. We’re making increasingly sophisticated illusions of sentience that people are turning into theologies.

2. Think deeply. Humans have automation bias and are pre-disposed to believe that an automatic analysis of a vast data archive is bound to be correct. This affects decision making.

3. “They’re selling us the benefits of bicycles while building the rockets.” Big Tech has marketed genAI as a Magical Everything Button, when what we need are the “bicycles of AI” – application-specific tools. These can and do exist! But funding is being pushed toward the behemoth companies.

• Klein: AGI is now defined as the point at which the majority of human economic activity is replaced by machines. (And this is supposed to be… good?)

• public opinion about generative AI has swung wildly in the last 2 years (validating).

• There needs to be much more transparency across the AI supply chain.

• AI regulation is a cross-partisan issue. 80% of Americans think regulation on AI is needed.

• Hao pointed to a bunch of examples of the “bicycles of AI”: e.g. a radio station in Aotearoa NZ that use language learning tools to help preserve the language spoken by Māori. Crucially, this was 1) a locally controlled, purpose-built tool and 2) built with the consent of elders and the community.

Other threads to pull on later:

• Creators Coalition on AI
• Distributed AI Research Institute
• Climate Change AI. A group working out how AI could mitigate the climate crisis. See whitepaper.