[HN Gopher] Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
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Anatomy of an AI System (2018)
Author : elie_CH
Score : 91 points
Date : 2022-03-10 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anatomyof.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (anatomyof.ai)
| nickelpro wrote:
| Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels
| like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate
| its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section
| on lithium mining:
|
| > Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a
| volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet
| via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible
| threads of commerce, science, politics and power.
|
| This purple language is evocative of, something? Like ya, we live
| in a globalized economy, things are connected, what of it? Is
| this supposed to be a brilliant insight or just a poetic
| restating of the obvious?
| jart wrote:
| It's a Factorio prerequisite chart of all the things you need
| to build before you can build Alexa. Although the pentagram
| plus seemingly unrelated fractal and u.s. wage diagrams make it
| look a bit strange. Needs more quantum mechanics and Godel.
| elie_CH wrote:
| Do you really think that child slavery for sourcing cobalt is
| "obvious" to most iPhone users? I doubt that.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJ8me22NVs&list=PLnUeRIXMDq...
| parksy wrote:
| I am so used to articles with a meaningless header image that I
| totally skipped that the map they're talking about is right at
| the top of the page. My brain filtered it out. After going back
| and looking at it, I think the map is pretty cool and would be
| great if it were dynamic and navigable in a leaflet container
| or something of the sort.
|
| But I agree I got tired of the prose about a third of the way
| in. I appreciate it, and can tell what they are getting at but
| I think regular hacker news readers are in a demographic that
| is already keenly aware of the interconnected nature of raw
| material extraction, supply chains, applied and theoretical
| sciences etc. I mean it's in our nature to process these
| thoughts because we're always looking for some missing
| connection, a forgotten or undiscovered niche, (edit to add,
| not to forget the human and environmental impacts of all of
| this as another user mentioned) etc etc.
|
| I do think there's plenty of folk who might see this as eye
| opening, especially the average consumer for whom devices just
| materialise out of money. I imagine the philosophical angle
| would be more thought provoking for someone who hasn't sat down
| and thought about it a whole heap.
|
| (second and final edit to add - on more thought I think if they
| made the map dynamic, and put the prose on little markers, that
| would be way more impactful to me at least as I think the
| spatial context would add a ton of value).
| uoaei wrote:
| If it feels obvious, you may be missing the point. Or else, you
| may simply be rationally contemplating the existence of the
| lesson without actually considering the lesson itself.
|
| If the document is "supposed" to be anything, it is as an
| entryway into contemplative empathy with the full-scale complex
| system we inhabit, the wonder that a civilization can be
| organized to the point where this is possible, and the explicit
| recognition of what experiences a loss when you want a gain. It
| is to understand that the comforts we've come to feel entitled
| to are built by extractive processes, whether material (mining,
| etc.) or otherwise (labor exploitation, opportunity costs,
| etc.).
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The real point of it for me is the framing. It's the idea
| that any object, tangible or intangible, and be analyzed in
| this way because everything has multiple dimensions of
| relations linking it to every other thing eventually. It's
| the equivalent of being able to pick up the graph of human
| relations by a single point and letting all other relations
| branch from that point like a tree. There's obviously root
| nodes that are more interesting than others just as there are
| more spanning trees more interesting than all the others.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| It seems it's supposed to evoke how everything is causally
| connected. Unfortunately, just pointing that out doesn't really
| do much without other things to connect to; "everything is
| connected" is just a truism without tying it back to something
| that flies in the face of that fact. Cybernetics is cool, but
| it's meant to be applied, not some hypothetical interesting
| factoid like pop-sci quantum mechanics.
| xpe wrote:
| The graphic is wonderful -- wide ranging and mind expanding.
| Think of it as a jumping off point in connecting sociotechnical
| systems around "AI".
|
| Also, for context around the project as a whole, you need to read
| the accompanying narrative (scroll down).
| wantlotsofcurry wrote:
| I can't speak on the technical side of things, but that graphic
| is beautiful. Might even frame and hang it up.
| rland wrote:
| I only got partway through this. I want to say to the author:
|
| Oh my god just stop taking yourself so seriously. Really. You
| don't need to do this. You're trying waaaay too hard.
|
| It's opaque and mysterious and lovecraftian _to you_ because you
| clearly spend all of your time making cool graphics and drawing
| tenuous metaphors between 16th century monks, pharaohs, and jeff
| bezos. I assure you, for everyone who works in a lithium mine or
| amazon datacenter doing the actual thing, it 's actually pretty
| obvious. you just, you don't need to write this maam.
|
| And also google "commodity fetishism" sometime.
|
| It does look cool though. Wonderful typography and illustrations.
| I have a nitpick which is that it's a little bit monochrome, a
| pop of color (maybe a gold? or like neon red) would really take
| it to the next level.
| xpe wrote:
| Taking oneself too seriously? Or a pair of authors building on
| top of a rich history of economic and social theory to make
| sense of an immense technology tree that affects millions?
|
| It is all in how you look at it.
|
| Criticizing is easy; we all do it sometimes.
|
| I do it too -- I'll take a negative interpretation and make
| uncharitable assumptions. Then it snowballs and out pops a not
| very nice thought which might end up as a HN comment.
|
| It seems that something grabbed you about the content. Perhaps
| if you look again and investigate the lens of the author you
| will find more to appreciate in it?
|
| I wonder if you would be willing to examine your claim that "it
| is all obvious to those who do it". Is it really? All parts of
| how things fit together are obvious? Am I misunderstanding you?
| xpe wrote:
| From the text:
|
| > Our exploded view diagram combines and visualizes three
| central, extractive processes that are required to run a large-
| scale artificial intelligence system: material resources, human
| labor, and data.
|
| Also:
|
| > Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielson use the term 'extractivism'
| to name the relationship between different forms of extractive
| operations in contemporary capitalism, which we see repeated in
| the context of the AI industry. 10 There are deep
| interconnections between the literal hollowing out of the
| materials of the earth and biosphere, and the data capture and
| monetization of human practices of communication and sociality in
| AI.
|
| What are the arguments both -for- and -against- a claim that
| "data" is an extractive process as used here?
| cjauvin wrote:
| The author wrote that book, which I found quite interesting:
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300209570/atlas-ai
|
| In particular, in this book there is a discussion about the
| dangers and epistemic distortions induced by the "supervised
| learning" paradigm in machine learning, which imposes rigid
| systems of classification on reality, which was a novel and
| refreshing angle for me.
| drc500free wrote:
| Really enjoyed poking around the graphic and diving into all the
| interlocking systems. Really didn't enjoy the prose below it as
| much. Rather than adding to it, it seemed to drown out other ways
| of consuming the information.
|
| I think I learned a lesson about how a heavy-handed POV can push
| the audience right past the ideal zone of understanding. Or maybe
| I didn't learn that lesson, and I will continue to write
| primarily to show off how insightful my insights are.
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