讓科技億萬富豪塑造世界的危險
The dangers of letting tech billionaires shape our world
Blake Montgomery 在《The Guardian》的 TechScape 專欄分析科技億萬富豪塑造世界的風險，並以 SpaceX 衞星服務在烏克蘭受限及其軍事影響為例。
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you while sitting in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental Drowning Girl, on view in New York City. Today in tech, we’re discussing the perils of Elon Musk’s one-man global infrastructure, AI-generated music, and a Guardian AI conference in Paris.
Elon Musk’s orbital ownership
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the single largest satellite operator in the world, larger than any government space bureau. The life-threatening consequences of that dominance and centralization of power are on full display. One man is in charge of global, vital infrastructure, which is thumbing the scales in the war on Ukraine.
SpaceX’s internet service was throttled in Ukraine amid a series of devastating attacks by Russia last week, leaving the country extremely vulnerable. The US government controls StarShield, the satellite internet service produced by SpaceXSI for the Pentagon, which is what Ukraine relies on. Objects moving faster than 100 mph (160.9 km/h) – drones, the centerpiece of Ukraine’s counteroffensive – lost connectivity. The sudden restrictions Tuesday evening led to the failure of several Ukrainian combat missions. Russian drones fly at nearly 200 mph (328.9 km/h), so Ukrainian interceptor drones can’t catch them without Starlink, and no alternative is as yet viable. In response, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned “people will die.”
The cutoff comes alongside Donald Trump’s mercurial souring on Ukraine. Pressured domestically by the high price of diesel and upcoming midterm elections, the US president has eased sanctions on Russia, and Zelensky has said US intelligence agencies on several occasions in recent days didn’t warn Ukraine of incoming missile attacks, as they usually do. Musk has denied his own involvement in StarShield’s malfunctioning, writing, “This is not under SpaceX control.”
Reuters reported that the request to throttle the service in Ukraine came from the White House. Responding to the claim, Trump said: “I don’t know if it was anybody because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon. And from what I understand, it’s the same as it’s always been.” US secretary of state Marco Rubio said “no one at the White House ordered anyone to slow down the internet.”
Musk’s denial has been met with skepticism given his close ties with the administration. It is impossible to disentangle him and SpaceX from the Trump administration. He has realigned himself with the White House in recent months, patching up his explosive feud with the president from a year ago and appearing with Trump at major events. Musk has been appointed to a Pentagon commission on the future of war and has given hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative Republican candidates.
Musk has also personally ordered the restriction of Starlink service in Ukraine before. In 2022, SpaceX cut off Starlink – not StarShield – service during a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the regions of Kherson and Donetsk. He refused Ukraine’s request to extend connectivity to Crimea the same year.
One tech tycoon’s political leanings are determining the tides of war between two sovereign nations. Musk’s alliance with the White House implicates him in the pressure campaign against Ukraine to end the war with Russia, likely via surrender.
Artists and fans reckon with AI-generated music
In recent weeks, notable musicians have confronted the growing presence of AI-generated music, saying they are open to it but wary, even boosters like the singer and producer Grimes, former paramour of Musk and mother to three of his 14 children.
Fans, by contrast, are voting with millions of streams against artifice in music. Songs and albums harkening back to analog instrumentation are dominating the Billboard charts, no futurism wanted.
Both A$AP Rocky, rapper and partner to Rihanna, and Grimes took the same position: I accept AI-generated music, but I don’t make it.
“I prefer to do things myself, practically,” A$AP Rocky told Billboard. “If somebody does a totally AI-generated song where all they did was prompt something, then I think that’s their thing. But who am I to say what’s standard and what’s not? I’m just doing me out here, and I’m doing my music practically – the right way.”
Grimes, one of my own favorite musicians, has begun promoting her first new album in six years, Psy Opera, which she described to The Paris Review as capturing the “emotion of being thrust into the future”. Stereogum described the album as “AI-inspired but not AI-generated”, citing Grimes’ own insistence that her team of 70 be credited rather than reduced to machines.
Grimes offered a free license of her own voice to AI enthusiasts to make what they would three years ago. That she declined to generate her own music indicates that, even to a futurist like her, AI-generated music is lacking, similar to Rocky’s stance.
I have also found myself listening to an AI-generated song, Bomboclat Wallahi, brought to my attention via frenetic, overstimulating videos on Instagram. Despite the song’s comical sonic maximalism, it lacks any staying power. Listening to it the day after I first heard it left no impression, similar to the way low-quality food leaves me hungry again just a few hours after eating. “Slop” is still the best word to describe AI-made content.
In contrast to artists’ nuanced stances, fans are making their position on tech-made music clear: They don’t want it. Billboard’s charts of the most popular albums and charts of the past week showcase a preference for music without obvious modification. Songs and albums that feature a simple voice-and-guitar arrangement are dominating. On the Top 200 album charts, most of the Top 10 albums foreground a singer over analog instrumentation – Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, Ella Langley’s Dandelion, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide and Stick Season, and Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem. In the Hot 100 singles chart, the top four songs bear the same sonic signatures: Swift’s Patient Zero, Langley’s Choosin’ Texas, Stella Lefty’s Boston, Wallen’s Been by Now.
Incredibly, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, released in 1965, also makes an appearance at No 4 on last week’s Billboard rankings. Some listeners want to return to a time when producing music with artificial intelligence wasn’t even an option.
Be more human: how to resist the creep of AI
My colleague Robert Booth reports from the Hacking Big Tech conference, a Guardian conference in Paris:
As the Paris Streets erupted with protest and violence on Saturday, a parallel radicalism was on display at the Hacking Big Tech conference organised by the French media organization Mediapart in conjunction with the Guardian. Amid the contributions from experts in military AI and how to fight against datacenters, a theme emerged about how people might respond to the tech wave: be more human.
The writer Naomi Klein told the audience that the technology companies intend AI to be used as an “everything app and also as a truth machine”. This, she said, was “very clearly a fascist idea, to centralise knowledge, to standardise what intelligence is”.
At a rare tech conference not addressed by representatives of tech companies, Klein painted a bleak AI-driven future in which there is “going to be more resource scarcity, there’s going to be more people who have no role in the economy and need to be contained and surveilled”.
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A response was available, she said: “We decide that we want to be more human.”
Humor was another answer. German Salazar, a Chilean activist campaigning to save water in his native country in the face of a wave of AI datacenters, showed how his community had set up a human chatbot to encourage people to prompt less and save water. The idea was simple: a team, ranging from children to town elders, offered human responses to chatbot queries from anywhere in the world for a day. If you want an image of a dog doing yoga, one of them will paint it for you. Want to know what love is? A human will tell you it is “the wish of someone else to be happy”.
There were 2,300 requests for images, 135 for dating advice and one for the meaning of life.
Read more: AI threatens democracy. But we are not powerless: here’s how to fight back
The wider TechScape
Tool and target: US law enforcement grapple with AI-enabled terrorism and anti-tech extremism
Apple unveils new smart home devices that showcase upgraded Siri AI
Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back
Outrage after Meta suspends No Kings Instagram account during protests
Elon Musk reveals ‘world’s first flying car’ at Tesla event
Inside the long, bitter fight over one man’s quest to build the biggest AI datacenter in California
Tech money is dominating the US elections
The ultra-rich are spending one million dollars a day fighting California’s proposed billionaire tax
Elon Musk becomes biggest donor of US midterms cycle with $366m spent
AI viruses
AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self-replication on smart devices
What are self-replicating ‘AI worms’, and why is Anthropic worried about them?
來源：The Guardian Technology · theguardian.com