This Crawford piece speaks very much to a thing I have personally been saying to a lot of people in my life and it is that we really need to pump the breaks a little on AI sensationalism because it is a marketing campaign, an AI power accelerator, a thing to argue about in the comments and therefor a major distraction.
Both pieces speak to the real-time on the ground effects of technological systems with biases, potentially operating on behalf special interests, almost entirely extra-judicially. Our being sounding-boards for the biggest hype machine around these systems only further draws attention to and justifies what issuing touted as an inevitability.
I am always very wary of these systems. I am seeing a lot of people (including our current president) who are abandoning the term artificial intelligence for AGI or super-intelligence. We still have no good definitions for what define these terms versus standard human intelligence. When we elevate this to a point that lays some kind of claim, because rogue agentic AI’s behave in strange ways we can’t quite predict, let alone curtail, to notions that it will almost necessarily, within a strange ever-changing statistic, that seems like it was calculated by AI, destroy the human species out of some Bostrom-like notion of the paper-clip-machine or whatever, we only help to mythologize and advertise for the seemingly infinite power of artificial intelligence systems. This happens look real good when IPOs are creeping closer.
It’s not to say it isn’t possible just that it isn’t happening yet and may never happen and as Crawford suggests and as is shown by Benjamin, there are real material degradations on human beings and our societies and our health and our access to resources and our potential for a multiplicity of futures.
AI is here to stay, what we, the living humans on this planet, decide it will become and where we fit in relation to it is still up for discussion. As with any major new technological development, it can be liberatory or or it can be oppressive, usually it is some combination of both, but it has to be viewed realistically and wielded accordingly.
1 comment
I agree, the definitions are cloudy (no pun intended) and they tend to shift with whoever is expressing their meaning. There’s a pre-AI essay by Bill Joy called “The Future Doesn’t Need Us” that was written in 2000 and predicts the coming of A.I. and autonomous bots and even social media that will eventually replace humans. I wonder if this is the biggest feat we have with A.I. today.