So: Pip FinkemeyerAustralian writer, in an article published on Guardian of yesterday (“Tech bros need the world to believe their hype. Here’s an idea – let’s just ignore them”) sparked a little reflection in me. Pip claims (I just call her Pip because Finkemeyer it’s too long and Miss Rottenmeier comes to mind) that we should stop believing in tech brosthat is, to that brotherhood of white males who have elected themselves priests of the future (Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and silicon company) those who do not sell technologies, rather, in his opinion, only themselves (so much for selling only themselves, believing that rockets Starship build them ChatGPT and behind ChatGPT there are millions of women reduced to answering the prompts?).
“The real product is not artificial intelligence,” he writes Pip“it’s the story they tell about themselves.” The end would not be the means, it is
Lego. White males. Not for anything else Pipauthor of the novel Sad Girl Novel (2023), in which she stands out for her ironic and self-deprecating and pop, however, she has a slightly distorted vision of the world in an angry feminist sense techinterpreting everything (from the algorithm to corporate leadership) as a form of male power. Pip she’s not the poor deceased Michela Murgia from England, for heaven’s sake, and it’s not like she would want to call the algorithm “algorithm” (also because it is neutral in English), except that it reduces the complexity of technology to a question of gender and every update to a patriarchal act.
However, it is precisely this exasperation that makes his speech interesting. It goes without saying that the theatricality of those who have power needs to tell their story in order to exist (this also applies to Batman or for Iron man, two white males without superpowers but with the power of money), which does not mean that the product does not exist, that the objects do not exist, that the revolution does not exist and there is only hype. Why the hypeIndeed, it has ended, or is about to end. No one believes anymore that artificial intelligence will change everything overnight or solve humanity’s problems or make us all die tomorrow (some fanatical dictators perhaps do). Except that the point is different: revolutions are not based about the hypethey happen much more slowly, when no one is expecting them anymore. Every real revolution begins when the rhetoric has died down and what remains infiltrates habits, as it is already doing: it is already inside our lives (long before “artificial intelligence” was in the speeches of ordinary people), and it will not go away because it is not a trend, it is a silent mutation.
Let’s think about the Internet. In the nineties it was just for chatting (the good old mIRC!), download MIDI sounds, connect to a site that loaded in half an hour. Then, without anyone realizing it, he ate the world. Not in ’95, but ten or
twenty years later. In 2005 there were still few people using i socialin 2010 almost all of them. In 2020 it was no longer possible to do without it, and today the Internet is no longer a technology, it is the very context in which we live, it is the world in which we spend the most time (except for someone like Mauro Corona who climbs mountains and connects only to talk to Bianchinaassuming this is really his life).
And again when Bill Gates talked about “a computer on every desk”, it seemed like a fantasy, and when Steve Jobs he announced
the first iPhone in 2007 the hype it was enormous, yet no one could imagine that this would not be a technological fad, but an anthropological mutation. It didn’t happen in 2007, nor in 2010, even in the following years, when the device became as natural as air, when technology stopped being amazing and became more natural than a glass of water (so much so that Greta even uses it Thunberg to become a global voice or to connect from Flotilla via Starlink). It even applies to cultural revolutions, it took years for them to be received, from the Impressionists to Pop Art, by Marcel Proust to me.
The same will happen with artificial intelligence, in fact it is already happening. We will no longer see it, we will no longer call it “AI”, it will be
simply the invisible mechanism that accompanies us, like the electric current or the operating system or the smartphone or the
streaming platforms or the same social: the hype ends when technology stops being promised and becomes a condition and
condition for the development of further technology. In short, the revolution of the AI they are not the viral videos of people talking to Leonardo Da Vinci nor the deep fake (which will be a big problem, but perhaps the least of the problems). In the end Pipwho at this point has become my sweetest Pip, seems sort of Sarah Connor on the contrary: instead of preparing for the arrival of the machines, he celebrates their end, to bury the white males. Too bad there are none Terminators is about to arrive and will never arrive (and in that case there will be no John Connor to send Kyle Reese back in time from which John Connor himself will be born) and that the story does not need heroines armed with feminism to change direction (by the way: was Terminator a feminist film? And Alien? In both cases the heroines are white women). Paradoxically the revolution begins just when the hype ends.
Of course, then the problem will be the use that humans will make of it (white or black males or females or trans or whatever you want), who as an animal species are specialized in making bad use of everything. But that’s another story. Kisses Pip.