my extracted annotations for @AnotomyAISystem

A brief command and a response is the most common form of engagement with this consumer voice-enabled AI device. But in this fleeting moment of interaction, a vast matrix of capacities is invoked: interlaced chains of resource extraction, human labor and algorithmic processing across networks of mining, logistics, distribution, prediction and optimization.

This is blackbox programming. Recent technologies are very much blackbox oriented. this is because they are mainly software based.

nothing will alert the owner to the vast network that subtends and drives its interactive capacities.

This article has heavy intentions of pushing blackbox

The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries.

Reflecting upon media and technology as geological processes enables us to consider the profound depletion of non-renewable resources required to drive the technologies of the present moment.

Each object in the extended network of an AI system, from network routers to batteries to microphones, is built using elements that required billions of years to be produced. Looking from the perspective of deep time, we are extracting Earth’s history to serve a split second of technological time, in order to build devices than are often designed to be used for no more than a few years.

As a Guardian investigation reports “tin mining is a lucrative but destructive trade that has scarred the island's landscape, bulldozed its farms and forests, killed off its fish stocks and coral reefs, and dented tourism to its pretty palm-lined beaches. The damage is best seen from the air, as pockets of lush forest huddle amid huge swaths of barren orange earth. Where not dominated by mines, this is pockmarked with graves, many holding the bodies of miners who have died over the centuries digging for tin.”

Relate this to the gum stuff from tully article
Atomic note about the use of limited resources to furthur our technological growth. The cycle of resources being used, depleated, and then a new one being found, possibly for a difference purpose. Human's greed. The toll technology takes on the earth.

At the bottom of the map is another kind of human resource: the history of human knowledge and capacity, which is also used to train and optimize artificial intelligence systems.

Books!

The Echo is but an ‘ear’ in the home: a disembodied listening agent that never shows its deep connections to remote systems.

Cloud computing and privacy. How safe are these? We allow them into our home at such a cheap cost, in which these devices can listen send our data to anyone over the internet.

The Victorian environmental disaster of gutta percha, from the early origins of the global information society, shows how the relationships between technology and its materiality, environments, and different forms of exploitation are imbricated.

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