AI: We Keep Making the Same Mistakes

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media

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I had a call the other day with the Dean of a top-five school of public health, and in between furiously scribbling notes (yes, I still take notes), it struck me that here in the United States we’re simply terrible at making proactive decisions based on evidence. We were talking about the pandemic, and the Dean observed that our public health systems failed us in those dark years, and we all had to fall back on our healthcare system – which of course is designed to react and respond to crises, not to identify, contain, or prepare for them. That’s the job of public health, and in 2020, it was not up to the job.

So now, given all we’ve learned about the pandemic, are we investing in a strong, resilient public health system? Of course not. We’ve decided that our collective health should be driven by the for-profit goals of capitalism, and capitalism will always optimize for short term gain over long term costs. In the US, 90 percent of investment in health care is in the medical industry, and just 3 percent goes into public health, the Dean told me. It’s bananas. Instead of learning our lesson and bolstering our public health defenses, we lean instead on the medical community to do post facto mop up duty.

How American is that? Act now, worry about consequences later. Ask for forgiveness, not for permission. Move fast, break things. Someone will always be there to do mop up duty, right? And when that mop up comes, fight like hell to make somebody else do it (and pay for it). It’s built into our national DNA. Manifest destiny, baby. Consequence be damned. It’s a pattern that repeats over and over again in American industrial history, and on that call with the Dean, I realized it’s happening again right now with our collective approach to artificial intelligence.

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The history of American capitalism is a history of exploitation – here was a land brimming with resource, all it took to build a fortune was hustle, determination, and enough capital to exploit the timber, coal, waterways, and other natural resources upon which our initial industrial base was built. The collateral damage of pollution, disease, displacement of native peoples, and eventual climate change? Problems for someone else to deal with.

Fast forward to today’s AI-driven Internet, which is being built with an equally enthusiastic disregard for the consequence of unchecked resource exploitation. In this case, of course, the resources in question are the words, thoughts, and interactions which comprise the entirety of the Internet itself – the world’s data and media. Every single AI company has hoovered up that resource without regard for future consequence – it’s an AI gold rush, after all, and there’s clearly short term profits to be made. Owners of some of those resources have cried foul – and/or attempted to at least share in some of those short term profits. But business development deals won’t save the ecosystem that is – or was – the open Internet. Only collective action will do that – and collective action, of course, is just another name for government.

I’m not sure we have the will to create the equivalent of a public health system for the Internet. And even if we did, it’d collapse under the weight of American capitalism’s passion for taking resources regardless of whether it has the right to do so.

Cassandra over here. I know. But I thought I’d at least point it out.