One of the first high-profile accomplishments of the technology was solving protein folding. There are a lot of incredibly good uses for machine learning. most of the rhetoric on HB about AI/machine learning amounts to actually-proudly-being what bourgeois histories used to shallowly say the Luddites were. Being spiteful about the technology itself over the most consumptive, superficial and limited, or reactionary expressions of it is like getting mad at the printing press for the publishers and publishing of the Protocols of Zion and Der Sturmer and their impacts, or at the combustion engine because of Hummers and private jets and the ecological impact of mass emissions. It is always with any new technological advancements in any industry/sector a question about the ownership and structural politico-economic incentives, and so its uses and for whose ends with what control, as it has been the case forever. And machine learning is an objectively powerful technology in computing, and in regards to data in which the organizing of and discovery of patterns in and extrapolating from and compressing over time could be said to be an apt basis of how human knowledge builds generationally in general.
It has never been the issue of the new technology in history, but its ownership and the material politio-economic incentives from the social organization of society, which dictate how it is used, developed, and furthered, to whose benefit and detriment. Nobody can or is going to be able "stop" the machine learning revolution in computing, which not only has powerful interests behind its development for many reasons but also has become an open source phenomenon so is never going "back in the box". And it is just as well, because it is just as no one was going to "stop" new machine-spinning technological innovations for textiles, or new types of combustion engine, or the development of new plastics, or different nuclear fission successes, etc. even with the harms that came from their ownership in the organization of the societies from which they emerged. It is just not how the history of human civilization and development of technologies in general has ever worked. And to make that the focus as many do on HB because of petty spite towards its most vapid consumptive expressions or the negative downstream effects and impacts of them in our current hyper-consumptive societal organization, and how its ownership heightens contradictions in capitalist social relations against labor (just as all technological advancements do and have, and as automation does and has been doing for 15 years but until it affected petty bourgeois jobs and interests no one online seemed to mind as much) is to wholly miss the reality of the situation and the real and necessary questions regarding it, which are the same questions as with all automated means of production, which are the same questions as the means of production and subsistence in general.
One of the first high-profile accomplishments of the technology was solving protein folding. There are a lot of incredibly good uses for machine learning. most of the rhetoric on HB about AI/machine learning amounts to actually-proudly-being what bourgeois histories used to shallowly say the Luddites were. Being spiteful about the technology itself over the most consumptive, superficial and limited, or reactionary expressions of it is like getting mad at the printing press for the publishers and publishing of the Protocols of Zion and Der Sturmer and their impacts, or at the combustion engine because of Hummers and private jets and the ecological impact of mass emissions. It is always with any new technological advancements in any industry/sector a question about the ownership and structural politico-economic incentives, and so its uses and for whose ends with what control, as it has been the case forever. And machine learning is an objectively powerful technology in computing, and in regards to data in which the organizing of and discovery of patterns in and extrapolating from and compressing over time could be said to be an apt basis of how human knowledge builds generationally in general.
It has never been the issue of the new technology in history, but its ownership and the material politio-economic incentives from the social organization of society, which dictate how it is used, developed, and furthered, to whose benefit and detriment. Nobody can or is going to be able "stop" the machine learning revolution in computing, which not only has powerful interests behind its development for many reasons but also has become an open source phenomenon so is never going "back in the box". And it is just as well, because it is just as no one was going to "stop" new machine-spinning technological innovations for textiles, or new types of combustion engine, or the development of new plastics, or different nuclear fission successes, etc. even with the harms that came from their ownership in the organization of the societies from which they emerged. It is just not how the history of human civilization and development of technologies in general has ever worked. And to make that the focus as many do on HB because of petty spite towards its most vapid consumptive expressions or the negative downstream effects and impacts of them in our current hyper-consumptive societal organization, and how its ownership heightens contradictions in capitalist social relations against labor (just as all technological advancements do and have, and as automation does and has been doing for 15 years but until it affected petty bourgeois jobs and interests no one online seemed to mind as much) is to wholly miss the reality of the situation and the real and necessary questions regarding it, which are the same questions as with all automated means of production, which are the same questions as the means of production and subsistence in general.