Guy Holder

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/guy-holder-4596854a_i-dont-think-i-have-heard-such-a-naked-exposition-share-7454225899031269376-oqBA

I don’t think I have heard such a naked exposition of the centrality of surveillance capitalism to the development of OpenAI than this 54 second clip from Sam Altman (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efSpDL0hZzM):

“These models are still quite dumb, relative to what they will be, but, more than that, they have quite limited awareness of your life, you are still having to, like, massage them and cajole them, to try and get the thing that you want.

We are no longer that far away from a model that just knows all of your contacts, it knows about you, it knows about your life, it knows what your doing, it knows what you care about, it knows about the people in your life, it has access to your computer and your browser (if you want, of course) and it has access, maybe increasingly over time, to what is going on in the real world around you.

That is going to be a complete change to what it feels like to use a computer, and what it feels like to use AI, and I am tremendously excited about that. But I don’t think even we have a good intuition yet for what that’s really going to feel like”
.........

To successfully develop their product, and to have it perform to its optimum potential, everything must be known. Everything. Virtually and ‘in real life’. Everything. It is there, above, in black and white. It is on the tape.

As Shoshana Zuboff wrote in her seminal book 'Surveillance Capitalism, there is no end to the drive for data, other than totality.

Where does this leave education, with regards to being protected from this vision of AI extractivism? Linked, and even more importantly, where does it leave the rights of children?

Sitting ducks, I would say.

As Karen Hao writes, the push for data disproportionately falls on “already vulnerable populations, including children”.

We have to resist this.