I have read fewer books this year but more pages. Even so a higher proportion of my read this year has been consumed with AI and its place of origin Silicon Valley.
The first of these, Karen Hao's Empire of AI, is an astonishingly well reported chronicle of contemporary AI's rise in recent years, its origins as the non-profit enterprises of self-appointed guardians of humanity, Sam Altman and Elon Musk prominently among them who worried about what AI left to other less prescient and prudent hands could spell for humanity's future. Could technology that potentially fashioned a superior competition to the human species be trusted in the hands of just anyone? But as the original vision of AI as literal intelligence programmed by humans receded into the same space occupied by jet packs and space colonies, while the stakes for arriving first to the market increased, the space race for "compute", brute computation of massive amounts of data in the processing of simulation of thought heated up, and schisms erupted in Silicon Valley and miraculously every altruistic non-profit morphed into for profit companies in search of dominance of the field. Hao's meticulous reporting also includes the impact that AI's sudden explosion in "compute" has had on the environment, particularly in already ravaged territories of the most vulnerable populations around the world, and especially in the global south. The manner in which a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have imposed themselves on the resources of indigenous peoples inspired Hao to liken AI's rise to Empire, reminding us that the greatest threat to humanity is not vaporware but certain elements of humanity itself.
Adam Becker's More Everything Forever deals with the predilections and sci-fi fantasies of Tech billionaires that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have summarized with the acronym TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism (a fancier name for Techno-Optimism or the belief that technology will solve all problems), Singularitarianism (belief in the inevitability of the Singularity), Cosmism (the ambition to spread human intelligence across the universe), Rationalism (Bayes Theorem supremacists), Effective Altruism (belief that maximizing one's capacity to give charitably by maximizing one's own wealth is better for collective happiness than acting charitably or being subject to taxation for social programs) and Long-Termism (belief that one should behave now in ways that improve the conditions of the cosmically spread progeny that is yet to come even if it is at the expense of those now living). Becker's book explains each proclivity indentifying the adherents and proponents and deftly debunking them along the way.
I knew Malcolm Harris was from Palo Alto and that his book of that name was a leftist critique of his hometown, but I wasn’t aware that it was basically making a case that Palo Alto was a (if not the) major hotbed for the worst ideas, tools and exponents of capitalism—largely through the auspices of Leland Stanford’s university and expecially as directed by one of its original class’s alumni, Herbert Hoover who lived long, long after his response to the Great Depression got him booted out of office after one term and remained as influential on the cadre of Stanford-affiliated capitalists as he ever was as President. It was born out of the genocide of the Alta people who were unlucky enough to be at the terminus of the intercontinental railroad when the barons arrived. It was the place where the most land raping technology of the gold rush was devised and served as the prototype of exploitation of immigrants for the various projects of capital, especially in ways that assured the thievery of those immigrant’s rights as citizens and neighbors. And when outcries against immigrant hordes were raised at various times by the temporary white majority, it invented outsourcing as a means of exploiting foreign non-whites on their own lands reducing the cost (and the bargaining power) of labor in the process. It invented tools of war but more especially proponents of war (including those who urged the use of atomic weaponry and of anti-communist adventurism in Indochina under the pretext of the domino theory. It was also the willful bastardizer of Binet’s theories of intelligence in devising and conquering the world with the Stanford Binet intelligences tests (literally devised to separate the cannon fodder from the officers in World War II and then adapted to promote racist eugenicist policies and to mold the American public education system into a factory for the production of workers. And it used all these historic means of exploitation and dominance to invent the silicon chip and the personal computer and the high tech bubble, and disruption and financialization and uberfication and surveillance capitalism and now AI.
Harris’s book weaves the tale very adeptly, revisiting the threads that have been in the town from the beginning. And in his conclusion he talks about the Muwekma Ohlone tribe that have been in Palo Alto from the beginning, and that survived the genocide, only to become unrecognized by the Federal Government due to anthropology out of Stanford. According to the US, the tribe is extinct but there has been a continuous presence of activists, working to get recognition and reparation in the sense of return of their lands to their original state. So Malcolm Harris in his final chapter raises the possibility of ceding Stanford’s land back to the Ohlone people. And on first reading about it, my brain automatically goes, “Oh yeah, sure! That could happen!” But Harris makes a passionate case for the symbolism as well the justice of the act, the start of a healing of the planet by putting an end to the locus of so much of the origin of capitalism’s interminable soulless destruction in the sole pursuit of profit and you can’t help but be struck by the simplicity of giving Stanford back to a people who will tend it back to nature. It’s the kind of idea that is unlikely to happen on the face of it, but just the notion of it increases the presence of beauty and justice in the world.
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* I'm reminded that this year I have also read Anna Wiener's excellent Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley.
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