Bart Hawkins Kreps is a long-time bicycling advocate and free-lance writer. His views have been shaped by work on highway construction and farming in the US Midwest, nine years spent in the Canadian arctic, and twenty years of involvement in the publishing industry in Ontario. Currently living on the outermost edge of the Toronto megalopolis, he blogs most often about energy, economics and ecology, at anoutsidechance.com.
The existential threat of artificial stupidity
Artificial intelligence, then, represents an existential threat to humanity not because of its newness, but because it perpetuates the corporate imperative which was already leading to ecological disaster and civilizational collapse.
March 15, 2024
Farming on Screen
There are many reasons why we might expect that agri-industrial AI will lead to more biodiversity loss, more food insecurity, more socio-economic inequality, more climate vulnerability. To the extent that AI in agriculture bears fruit, many of these fruits are likely to be bitter.
March 5, 2024
Watching Work
All work involves, to some degree, both body and mind. This plays a major role in the degree to which AI can or cannot effectively replace human labour. Yet even if AI can not succeed in taking away your job, it might succeed in taking away a big chunk of your paycheque.
February 22, 2024
Beware of WEIRD Stochastic Parrots
Just what, according to its namers, are the distinctive characteristics of a stochastic parrot? Why should we be wary of this species? Should we be particularly concerned about a dominant sub-species, the WEIRD stochastic parrot?
February 15, 2024
“Warning. Data Inadequate.”
Due to its incorporation of a simple “neural network” loosely analogous to the human brain, the perceptron of 1958 is recognized as a forerunner of today’s most successful “artificial intelligence” projects – from facial recognition systems to text extruders like ChatGPT.
February 8, 2024
Artificial Intelligence in the Material World
With the performance of individual AI-specialized computer chips now measured in TeraFLOPs, and thousands of these chips harnessed together in an AI server farm, the electricity consumption of AI is vast.
February 5, 2024