Agnotological AI 
robhorning.substack.com

“Agnotology” is the study of the deliberate production of ignorance. In this article, Rob Horning looks at generative AI through that lens.

For much of the piece, Rob accuses AI of destroying human curiosity. Brought into schools, for example, education can:

[…] become a matter of consuming abstract demonstrations of “convenience,” without students having to commit to caring about any underlying interests. Untethered from any particular goal, their self-optimization can become a kind of infinite regress, an insatiable preoccupation that promises to pre-empt other forms of existential anxiety. Ignorance appears as efficiency, and helplessness appears as liberation (as when rich people proudly advertise their turning to chatbots for help with basic human decency).

Next, he ties AI to the cheap, empty-calorie pleasure served up by social platforms. That pleasure comes from fakes and scams, and it can be replicated endlessly “by the laziest of grifters.” Rob goes on:

AI’s express purpose is to discourage people from thinking, creating, or making decisions, and most of the marketing for it is meant to acclimate people to that passive and stupefied condition as if it were a kind of manifest destiny.

For me, the high point of the article is the next paragraph:

A shorter way of putting that is that the purpose of AI is to reap profits from destroying curiosity. Why would tech companies want to do that? It may be that they simply have to commit to what their technology can actually accomplish (is there a difference between a smart machine and a stupid public?), but perhaps they also assume that sapping people’s will and undermining their belief in the value of experiencing new thoughts makes them more manipulatable consumers who only care about “efficiently consuming time,” as this analysis of Chinese microdramas concludes. They may not want more, but their inertial desire can be made more compulsive while it’s steered toward lucrative targets. If you can’t come up with desires on your own, you’ll need technology and marketing to inject you with a sense of purpose. And the push for AI certainly embeds more surveillance in our infrastructure as well as the processing capacity to weaponize it against anyone.