Notes, quotes:
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
Xiaowei Wang
Introduction
p. 4 - q
"Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity"
p. 7 - what is it to be human
"What does it mean to live, to be human right now? Looking at tech in rural China forced me to examine the ideologies that drive engineers and companies to build everything from AI farming systems and blockchain food projects to shopping sites and payment platforms. These assumptions about humans and the way the world should work are more powerful than sheer technical curiosity in driving"
Chapter 1: Ghosts in the Machine
p. 28 - i hate the mirror metaphor. perhaps it is merely a screen, for what do screens do if not sell
"look at my own device. The darkened screen beckons to me, reflecting back like an ancient scrying mirror, a device used for divination, a mirror on which to project all our desires"
Chapter: Recipe: How to Feed an AI
p. 32 - mp and embodied cognition eh
"In Chinese medicine, there are eleven vital organs that work holistically to sustain life, and this list does not include the brain. Brain functions are scattered throughout the body."
Chapter 2: On a Blockchain Chicken Farm in the Middle of Nowhere
p. 44 - yep...
"As John says this, I think of a common refrain I hear in China: “The West doesn’t understand our problems. We just have too many people. The government has to operate at a scale you can’t even imagine."
Chapter 3: When AI Farms Pigs
p. 77 - q
"As ASF unfolds in China, it’s clear that optimization has wrought a complex system with consequences humans could never have imagined in our precise models and calculations. These consequences expose that sense of control as a total delusion. Yet the quest for optimization continues."
p. 79 - was just thinking this
"It would be impossible to optimize life for these kinds of joy. Such pleasure cannot exist in a fully optimized world."
p. 90 - q
"In an early work, Understanding Computers and Cognition, the computer scientists and AI pioneers Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores point out our tendency to ascribe rationality to computers. We do this when a physical system is “so complex, and yet so organized, that we find it convenient, explanatory, pragmatically necessary for prediction, to treat it as if it has beliefs and desires and was rational."
p. 94 - yes
"It is easy to automate work using AI once you’ve made work devoid of meaning"
Chapter 5: Made in China
p. 124 - q
"If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?"
Chapter 6: “No One Can Predict the Future”
p. 167 - q
"Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls “quantifauxcation”: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty."
p. 168 - q
"As the scholar-activist Ruha Benjamin puts it, “Crime prediction is better understood as crime production.”5 The intractability of life to be rendered"
Chapter 8: Welcome to My Pearl Party
p. 237 - read
"An Xiao Mina and sociologists have shown, the driving force behind broader sociopolitical change has always been culture, with or without the internet.7"
