AI, Productivity, and the Question of Public Good

Written with the assistance of an AI 

Artificial intelligence is often presented as a neutral engine of progress. Faster processes. Better decisions. Lower costs. Higher productivity. The promise is almost mechanical: introduce AI, and prosperity follows.

But productivity alone has never guaranteed public good. And in the case of AI, this assumption deserves closer scrutiny.

What AI undeniably does is create capacity - the capacity to predict, generate, coordinate, and optimize at a scale previously impossible. Whether that capacity improves collective wellbeing is a different question altogether.

To answer that, we must first understand what AI actually costs, how it is financed, and what kinds of value it is structurally incentivized to produce.

Kapital Hari Esok

Sepanjang sejarahnya, manusia selalu mengejar tingkat produktivitas yang lebih tinggi. Manusia bekerjasama, mencipta alat, memperalat hewan, memperbudak sesamanya, menciptakan mesin, dan mengeksploitasi tenaga manusia. Setiap tahapan sejarahnya adalah dorongan revolusioner untuk berproduksi lebih banyak, lebih efisien, lebih cepat, dan lebih sempurna. Setiap generasi menjadi saksi untuk percepatan peningkatan kemampuan produksi yang dipacu oleh satu senjata yang tidak dimiliki oleh makhluk yang lainnya: Teknologi.

Ketika semut dan tawon masih bekerja dengan pola yang sama sejak milenia yang lalu, manusia telah melakukan berbagai lompatan-lompatan menakjubkan, berjuta-juta lompatan mengagumkan, dan mengubah cara berproduksinya dibandingkan abad atau bahkan dekade yang lampau. Menatap ke depan, umat manusia sedang berada di penghujung satu lagi revolusi.

The World As I See It

Some would be about cities and urban life,
some other capture humanity,
and the rest would merely show my indecent appetite towards

space, pattern, & geometry.

Praise To The Driverless Cars

The world lately is in a hype of the development of a new technological breakthrough in transportation field, prominent companies like Apple, Google, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, etc are in the race to deliver the best and functional: Driverless Cars.

The development of Driverless Cars employs so many frontier technology; robotics, radar, lidar, GPS, odometry, computer vision, advanced control system, space sensing, etc. New ideas of how a car should be able to behave are also tried to be implemented, for example design of wheels that can rotate 90 degrees so a car can maneuvers to its side directly to escape a congestion.

Despite being progressive in terms of technological advancement and product design, the true nature of the invention and development of Driverless Cars tend to be conservative.