Big Tech and Nuclear Power
Is Big Tech Under or In Control of Humanity?
Re: Report on Big Tech building nuclear power plants to accommodate Artificial Intelligence.
I have no problem with Google, MS, Amazon, and other Big Tech companies building nuclear power plants to meet the demands of AI and clean energy if there are sufficient regulations in place for nuclear energy production, distribution, use, storage, safety, and profitability in the public interest. If — and there are not. This also includes AI.
In that I concur with former FCC director Tom Wheeler whom I just hosted to speak at our continuing education program last evening on his book Tech-Lash which I strongly recommend.
I do have a problem with Big Tech amassing huge sums of money and dedicating their profits to control politicians and legislation and thus furthering the plutocratic and autocratic takeover of democracy as the latest New Yorker article by Charles Duhigg reports.
I personally think that Wheeler does not go far enough in his analysis, prognosis, or treatment strategy. That is because I am a philosophical thinker trained to look at the “invisible” in analysis, prognosis, and strategy by my teachers in phenomenological and pragmatic thinking and political action.
The “invisible” is the unfocused ground of figure or unattended background of concept. It includes the assumptions of logical reasoning. It includes the temporal-spacial context in judgment and expression — the history of ideas. It includes the preobjective and intersubjective aspect of objective experience: corporal consciousness or bodily spirit. It includes the personal and interpersonal values fueling the questions of reality and morality including those of self-interest, meaning, and power and their economic, cultural, and political habits and institutions.
Admirably, Wheeler arrives at some regulations and a framework for regulation for a social democracy. But he does this without a critique of American politics (e.g., representative democracy and liberalism), economics (capitalism and profit, ownership of land, wage-based wealth, commodification of labor and nature, etc.), and culture (including philosophy, religion, education, art, media, ethnicity, morality). He did not say what peoples’ organizations need to play. Nor did he show how TechLash itself underlies many if not all the issues that people are now facing. He did not even reflect on the stake of the 2024 election citizens are facing and its crucial significance for this effort. He
I do not know his vision for advanced technology and how that influences his perception of the issue. I read the book, The Revolt Against Humanity, by Adam Kirsch considering two unfolding futures, 1. Reduction of the human proclivity to kill nature (e.g., climate change) and 2. Evolutionary transformation of the human species (artificial general intelligence). That is a choice of seeing utopia before mechanization of humanity or in the future by changing the species. Go back or push forward. Or, I would add, some combination of both.
I do not mean to discredit Wheeler in the least. I thank him for wrestling with the issue. I only say that there is greater work to be done. I am pleased to see some others doing it. I hope that a more vigorous strategy process is democratic, that it involves experts in political, economic, and cultural thinking, but most of all citizens: consumers, caregivers, teachers and students, workers, neighbors, voters. I hope that the strategy is as revolutionary as the transition that our culture, politics, and economy are now undergoing.
We the people as the People need to hold strong tension with Big Tech which now supplies and even controls Big Pharma, Big Manufacturing, Big Energy, Big Parties, Unions, Money, and a lot of other Bigs to which we are subjecting our freedom.