from the bring-back-the-punk-ethos dept

Sam Altman is not punk. He’s no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn’t make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history.

Let’s call the AI industry what it is: Big Data 2.0.

Cyberpunk is fiction about corporate domination set in the future. In popular novels by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, the people running AI today would be The Corporation. The hackers are the protagonists on the other side.

The Internet before Big Data had real outlaws and hackers. The punks were computer scientists, programmers, citizens, advocates and working professionals who built tools to resist. Some started companies, others advocacy groups; most pitched in any way they could.…