TheMarketForIdeas

Planet Earth is both an immense habitat – our cradle – and a gravitational vehicle – with circumsolar motion. With its array of natural (im)balances, the Earth is a venerable 4.54 billion years old; the (industrial) imprint left by the human species on it, deemed not negligible, barely exceeds two centuries; and our digital/IT&C/virtual existence, in what we call cyberspace, makes us feel still too young. This quite new frontier to be conquered is competing with the expansive cosmic imagination (Universe), but inverted into a quantum-ritual dreamscape (Metaverse), somehow simplistically assimilated with the internet. Yet, cyberspace is more than the sum, it is the synergy of computers (and all assimilable devices), servers, routers, and other globally connective digital infrastructures (hardware), “animated” by software, including here the omni-technology of our utopias/dystopias, Artificial Intelligence. In our quest for space and sense we do struggle to understand whether AI is a friend or a foe.

If these innovative frontiers – the exo(cosmic) and the endo(cybernetic) – already create a fusion (satellites inform the network), they rely on old earthly behaviours. Let’s call them extractive. Since humans began to take their lives into their own hands, they have been “extracting things from nature”: from hunter-gatherers to farmers and miners, further turning the wheels of the division of labour towards increasingly differentiable activities, bundled into increasingly complex ensembles. But humanity has never been able to shed the extractive component of existence, whether we talk about its primary sense (i.e., the fruit of the soil and the riches of the subsoil), or the derived, metaphorical sense, which targets the sets of rules that govern us, “social animals”, socio-politico-economically. Yes, we, the human species, have created both extractive industries and extractive institutions, as Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson eloquently remind us in their hyper-quoted book Why Nations Fail.

Extractive institutions are a toxic combination of lack of law and order, insecure property rights, barriers to entry, and regulations that impede market functioning and create an unfair playing field, designed by and for the benefit of the “elite” (bureau-pluto-klepto-cratic). Their antonyms are inclusive institutions. The history of the world is a “dirty dance” between these two basic types of societal arrangements, which do not exist in pure form, but in cynically parasitic amalgams (for parasites, even more the rational ones, do not kill their victims). Then, not at all coincidentally, such extractive institutions have cohabited with physical resource extraction, culminating with the colonial plunder, but perversely extended into the post-independence era. Moreover, technological waves of (r)evolution enrichment the very meaning of extractivity. Today, we ravenously extract natural givens, but we have also added artificial data to the menu. We mine the common habitat and undermine our intimate habits?!

This pair of extractions can be read in multiple keys, tributary to certain thought-schemes (theories, doctrines). As humans, we mentally extract from reality only what our intellectual tools (and biases) allow us, right? In Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford, a (neo)Marxist-oriented researcher, condemns the social irresponsibility of extracting the minerals needed to support optimizing computing power: from lithium mines in Nevada (USA, supposedly at the core of “eco-conscious” civilization) to the toxic sludge in Baotou (China, the unaccounted-for residues of “rare earths”); from language and image processing models, specific to energy-hungry AI training, to the under-supply of water to some communities due to consumption dedicated to cooling “server farms” – AI is a huge extracting mammon. Surely, there are also conservative (in the sense of value systems) critiques of this techno-revolution. For example, Neil Postman’s assessment – Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

Here we have another type of extraction. An extraction from common sense. One that would occur through the “reification of man” and the “deification of technology”. Such a mutation preceded the appearance of AI, being only augmented and accelerated by it: the revolution manifests itself through the breaking of the link between information and human purpose, data wandering indiscriminately, oriented towards no one in particular, in staggering volumes and at dizzying speeds. But this maintained chaos has rent extractors. Information drained of sap (especially moral) and processed simplistically (despite sophistication) through statistics, polls, or mock IQ tests – on the principle that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, “to an expert with a computer, everything looks like data” – (de)generates (into) control and command tools/weapons. Whether progressives or conservatives, tech pundits or ignoramuses, we are heading to “datacracy”. As either extractors or extractables.

Photo source: Cottonbro Studio.