Douglas Rushkoff feels responsible .
Rushkoff is a Gen - ten writer and thinker who was part of the initial undulation of technical school counsellor in the 1990s who sell the world on a next online “ I was part of the initial wave of people who state : ‘ amount on in , the pee ’s mulct , ’ ” he tells me .
Three ten on , the globe look very unlike . Corporations have woven themselves into the fabric of our daily interactions , supercharge by the internet and social media . Now , it appears that artificial news will help corporations program human race quicker and better than ever before .
Writer Douglas Rushkoff speaks onstage at Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now during the 2013 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival at Austin Convention Center on 10 December 2024 in Austin, Texas.© Photo by Waytao Shing/Getty Images for SXSW)
Rushkoff sees that as an opportunity . “ It ’s like digital medium last has a character , ” Rushkoff say of AI .
Over the course of his more than thirty career , Rushkoff has written books that heralded the joyousness of the internet and warned of the perils of the corp that sought to control it . In 2010 he wrote a slim volume calledProgram or Be Programmed : Ten Commands for a Digital Age . It was full of practical and meaningful advice for living in a digital world .
The commands were simple and easy to understand : do n’t always be online , do n’t sell your friends , separate the truth , you’re able to always select ‘ none of the above , ’ dwell in person , one size does not fit out all , be yourself , you are never completely correct , and portion , do n’t slip . Rushkoff ’s philosophy and a monition were contained in its net command : program or be programmed .
According to Rushkoff , man should be literate about how machine forge and see that it ’s humans who build up machines to service them . Not the other way around . Some of that hail down to learning programming languages , or at least how if - then command work , but it ’s bounteous than that . “ Learn to recognise the prejudice of the media that they ’re using . It ’s that dim-witted , ” he aver .
The book of account sold well but , he state , was misunderstood . “ When the book first came out … it became a ‘ learn to encrypt ’ thing . It became an logical argument for STEM , ” he say . “ We should know something about how engineering science works . But [ the book ] was an argumentation for liberal arts , for how we think critically about these environments . I do n’t think anyone quite got that . I do n’t imagine anyone get that , that variety of McLuhan - esque demand that we look at digital media as an environment that ’s change who we are , that ’s change what it means to be human . ”
He just published an update version of the rule book that includes an superfluous command that ’s all about AI : “ Value the man . ”
“ The salutary thing about AI is it ’s devote us the power to finally look and say , ‘ Oh , these engineering behave on us . ’ You postulate to get all the way to the science fiction stead of ‘ there ’s an AI in there doing something to me ’ to see that , really , all technologies are doing something to you , ” he say . “ They ’re all trying to program you in one way or another . ”
Rushkoff ’s first vainglorious Bible wasCyberiain 1994 . It was an early geographic expedition of cyberspace culture that , harmonize to its author , was over by the time it slay the shelf . “ At the end of that Good Book , Wired powder magazine had just write their first issue , ” Rushkoff says . “ Until that power point , Mondo 2000 and the psychedelic populace had been kind of running net culture . ”
There was a dream in the other 1990s of what the net would be and what it could do for manhood . “ Internet culture was so much about the ungoverned potential of the collective human imagination . Networked together , what are we die to do ? ” But Rushkoff also see the warning signs . bay window began to circle and they inquire a unlike enquiry entirely .
“ What happens when we transmigrate the most propagandistic technique of publicizing and merchandising and public relations to interactive environments ? ”
Rushkoff says that Gen - X counterculture is partly to blame . “ We in the 90s , rave return - culture , are largely to blame for not bring in forward the social justice agenda of the 1960s with us , ” he tell . “ A lot of the masses I talked to in the rave import were saying ‘ We have the agendum of no schedule . All are welcome . Feel this thing and it will unfold by nature . ’
accord to Ruskhoff , the raver count at the punk trend of the recent past times and find them too political and too reactionist . “ We pushed the government off the meshing , … we did n’t pull in , when you get disembarrass of government , you create free sovereignty for business , ” he read . “ That deregulating did n’t just mean no censoring of my LSD trades on e-mail , it imply no restrictions on Intel and Amazon and Facebook . So we were politically naif as we go into this , and we did not establish a stringent set and setting around the evolution of the cyberspace . ”
As the net marched forward , the California civilisation that helped mould it merge with other eldritch West Coast idea and became something new . “ So the Maslow ’s power structure of needs , self - actualization , self - improvement , part of California refinement stayed but make married to this variety of libertarian , Ayn Rand capitalist thing , ” Rushkoff says . You come forward 25 years and you terminate up with these decouple anarcho - capitalists as feudal noble of these landscapes . ”
One of the unpleasant facts about the net is that it was made by humans who design it to playact on other humans . When we talk about why YouTube express us things we do n’t require to see , we complain about “ the algorithm . ” When Facebook feeds us a cosmic string of AI slop , we bewail “ our feed . ” But the unproblematic verity is that we see all this stuff for a cause : a human being designed it that manner .
“ AI provides a really coherent metaphor for what I ’m talk about . AI does n’t do any of the things that citizenry are afraid of , but AI demonstrates to people that this medium adapts to what you ’ve done . It changes . It learns you . You ’re in a feedback loop topology , ” Rushkoff says . “ So you have an US Army of top-notch fast artificial intelligences that have no agenda of their own , but have the docket of Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg . ”
He point to Twitter , now X. “ depend at the total propaganda environment of Twitter/ X now , ” Rushkoff says . “ [ Elon Musk ] owns the thing . He sends you his own subject matter . He send you the messages of the mass he want you to see , no matter what stream of conversation you ’re in . The ads , the bot , are the worldview that he wants you to have . It ’s hard to be on that platform and not think : ‘ Well , that ’s the creation . ’ Even if I ’m saying something else , the breeze that I ’m breathe in here is that awful techno - fascist , bullying , mean , troll , cruel . ”
Rushkoff tells me he ’s alarmed by how far this thinking has spread . “ Even the reform-minded left has adopted the programmer ’s prototype of , ‘ How do we get people to be more aware of the climate ? How do I get people to use up better ? ’ ” He says . “ Once you ’re babble about ‘ how do I get people to do something ? ’ You ’re say , ‘ how do I programme people ? ’ ”
“ We adopted that understanding of humans as programmable by our systems rather than our organization being programmable by people , ” he says . He go for that this new variation of Program or Be program will push this epitome geological fault forward . He go for that AI will aid them see that a expert world is potential and that all of these machines are human conception and that human beings should be at the heart of everything we do .
“ If technology really can do all these tasks , all this stuff , if they really do have way more utility value than humans , then do we want to double up down on our usefulness value as our core offer , or do we desire to come out looking at human values ? What do we offer that they ca n’t ? ”
you may findProgram Or Be Programmed : Eleven mastery for the AI Futurewherever book are sell .
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