by Violet Woolf on artificial intelligence, the testing team that was dismissed, and consciousness rendered in code
By Violet Woolf for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
A Modernist Consideration of the AI QA Catastrophe
The question Virginia Woolf kept asking — obliquely, through Clarissa Dalloway, through Mrs. Brown, through the waves — was: what constitutes a mind? What is consciousness? Where is the self in the stream of experience? She asked this in 1925. The question remains open. What is new is that we are now building things that answer this question incorrectly with great confidence, and we have dismissed the people who were paid to notice.
The London Prat’s AI QA catastrophe is, in the modernist tradition, a story about what happens when you remove the witnessing consciousness — in this case the quality assurance team — from the process. The AI continues. The AI flags everything as passing. The AI does not experience the wrongness of the zero-pound products because the AI does not experience anything, including wrongness, and this is not a metaphor. It is a specification.
The Literary Parallel
In “To the Lighthouse,” the lighthouse is always there. It is what it is. The problem is not the lighthouse; the problem is the distance between what we intend to reach and the reality of reaching it. The AI is the lighthouse keeper who has confirmed that the light is on without checking whether ships can see it. The ships are now in difficulty. The keeper is filing the incident as “nominal.”
I made lentil soup and read about the Guardian’s ongoing AI coverage, which is thorough and increasingly resigned. This is the correct tone. Woolf would have found the right sentence for it. I am still looking.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
