DeepSeeking in the Gaza Strip
AI is both the tyrant and the rebel and Gaza is about to get massive curb appeal.
This is the era of optimization. Virtual doctors’ appointments, cashless transactions, automated support lines, and online dating.
What previously has been treated as unavoidable aspects of the human experience are being reduced to flotsam floating in the wake of a cruiseliner named the SS Efficiency.
Need to find a new diet or craft a legal solution? How about a medical diagnosis or a plot for your next novel? There’s an AI for that.
I’ve got a 4000-word essay on artificial intelligence and the existential risk it may or may not pose to humanity in the can since last year sometime, but I haven’t figured out what it is I’m trying to say. I’ll try to condense my thoughts here. AI (or, more accurately, the prospect of artificial general intelligence) is set to fundamentally alter society as we know it — think: sentient printing press with a license to kill.
Capitalism is an enterprise focused on efficiency. How can a product be produced more effectively, how can profit be maximized, and how can the consumer base be expanded — leaving no waste in the system? If forced to choose from the available economic philosophies with no stipulation, free market capitalism is undoubtedly superior to feudalism, communism, or whatever you’d call Bidenomics, but that’s not to say it’s without its flaws.
Competition was supposed to be good for the consumer, assuming it was a better product that multiple companies were competing to create. What happens when the corporation doesn’t improve on its product but is deceiving the consumer otherwise? What happens when the fast food chain convinces your biology that the sugars and fats it craves are more present in its hamburgers and fries than they actually are?
Or what if a pharmaceutical company promoted the use of a miracle weight loss intervention that didn’t predominantly involve diet and exercise? Efficiency doesn’t mean better in the same way that hours invested doesn’t correlate to value.
There is already an asymmetrical relationship between the corporation and the individual. The experts have been consulted, the focus groups weighed in, and your data has been scraped from every corner of the internet. Algorithms know your wants and needs better than you do and are priming you to ‘add to cart’ long before you open a browser. To paraphrase Blur, they’ve got a file on you.
Superpowered AI, the type that the federal government and Amazon will raze whole cities to store their server farms, only exacerbates the discrepancy between the corporate government and you. As someone who’s a relative Luddite in the AI debate, I’m reluctant to say that while AI might be the problem, it may be the solution as well.
China’s ChatGPT simulacrum DeepSeek hit the US last week, and it caused a stir. It wasn’t without the same sort of problems exhibited by OpenAI’s large language model in those early days: masking truths, obvious censorship, etc. For instance, you couldn’t get it to talk to you about Tiananmen Square.
This is all part and parcel of an LLM, and the China-oriented specifics it was memory-holing weren’t surprising, nor were they the most notable part of its debut.
The big shock to the American system was that DeepSeek’s creators had replicated the States’ best efforts using much less expensive hardware. As if throttling Nvidia’s stock wasn’t enough, DeepSeek’s code is open-source, meaning it could be recreated by anyone who has the skill and the mundane chips it was built upon suggest it wouldn’t be exactly cost-prohibitive.
Well, someone already has. A researcher with a home lab recreated DeepSeek’s open source program on a $2,000 rig.
This could be the great equalizer. It’s like when the Catholic church wouldn’t allow the distribution of the bible for fears that the faithful would get any wild ideas about the established hierarchy, but then ol’ Gutenberg printed his own. It didn’t totally level the playing field between the Holy Roman Empire and those dirty serfs, but it was only a few years later that Martin Luther nailed a post-it note of complaints to the church doors.
Honestly, until I got to mention the Holy Roman Empire, I was bored to tears. I do find this topic incredibly important, it’s just that I find the whirring of technology rather uninspiring. Nonetheless, we press on!
Personal AI will combat the ones employed by those little devils in DC and the serpentine tech bros of Silicon Valley — and open source is the key to democratizing the technology. (For those keeping score, OpenAI’s project is not open in the slightest; Zuckerberg’s Meta, however, is open source.) It would be the most efficient defense available.
You can train yours on the corpus of Cormac McCarthy to deliver one last great American novel, query the spirit of Book of Exodus, scramble your activity from the prying eyes of the fuzz, or reenvision your mom’s Tae Bo VHS tapes — all uses are valid. It’s yours, do with it what you want.
Predictably, the US government panic-writes bills about things it doesn’t understand. A bill has been tabled in Congress aimed at limiting DeepSeek’s market impact (think: TikTok ban) that would effectively criminalize sharing or downloading open source LLMs. Land of the free!
In the same way I support the 2nd Amendment but have no firearms (if you’re thinking of robbing my house, I actually have loads of guns), Americans will need a constitutional amendment allowing the use and possession of personal artificial intelligences. This may all seem humdrum, but AI is inevitable, and the only thing that can save us from its weaponization is a weapon of our own — obviously.
If you bought any of that, then I have a time share in Gaza I’d like to sell you.
Trump 2025 turns out to be less fascist than his detractors predicted and more like a pushy travel agent with the worst destinations.
‘What do you think about a gondola ride through the Panama Canal?’
‘And if that’s not your thing, what about sightseeing in the Arctic tundra of Greenland? The polar bears are especially hungry this time of year!’
‘No, I see. You’re a special couple looking for a special way to celebrate your twentieth wedding anniversary. I don’t do this for everyone, but what if I could set you up with two tickets to the Tunnel of Love in Gaza? It’s really a blast.’
When meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the United States should take control of the Gaza Strip. What an awful good idea. Good in the way that I feel like the United States has always deserved its own Emirates, and I could cosplay as an oil sheik or an owner of a football club while I’m there, but bad in the way that would almost certainly mean American troops on the ground.
He’s not wrong in describing the area as a demolition zone, but his ability to imagine why anyone would want to live there amongst the rubble was sorely lacking. Boobytrapped labyrinthine terrorist tunnel network or no, it’s still the home of a couple of million people.
Trump did say that those who would want to remain would be allowed to do so, but suppose those people want Hamas to stick around, too? Latest polls suggest that would be the case. So, that establishes the new goal of discerning who’s Hamas, who’s Palestinian Jihad, who’s on UNRWA payroll (ooooooohhh got ‘em) and who’s actual citizen. Right back where we started.
If only, if only, there were some country nearby that had a Palestinian majority population that had ample room to take some of these people in. If only there was a country just to the South of Gaza that used to govern the area but closed off its border to the people long before the latest war broke out that could house a few refugees. If only there existed a country (or two) that funded the Hamas regime and encouraged the massacre of October 7th, without which we wouldn’t be presented with this particular problem, that could open its arms to its Muslim and Arab brothers and sisters.
I wish I had the answers. It’s times like these that I like to remember when my buddy Jordan saw the pyramids, I ran back to the World Cup. I don’t know why that story always makes me feel better, but maybe it could help world leaders, too.
Honestly, a ‘Mediterranean Riviera’ for the ‘people of the world’ is probably the best possible result for the people of Gaza — it’s just the small matter of taking it from where it is to an idyllic vacation spot that presents a giant hurdle. Nevertheless, the innocent civilians in Gaza who’ve been forced to live in subhuman conditions during the war by their elected government deserve better than what they’ve gotten over the last year.
But while we wait on that possible reality to unfold, let’s bring the rest of our hostages home, yeah?
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA