Never underestimate the power of saying no. Just as AI hypers say that the technology is inevitable and you need to just shut up and deal with it, you, the reader, can just as well say “absolutely not” and refuse to accept a future which you have had little hand in shaping. Our tech futures are not prefigured, nor are they handed to us from on high. Tech futures should be ours to shape and to mold.
Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna
I recently read The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. It was a solid summary of problems with the current wave of “Artificial Intelligence” that has so completely captured the attention of tech leaders over the past few years. It examines how these pieces of software have numerous negative impacts with very little real upside, and how talk of achieving artificial general intelligence or superintelligence is just marketing with no real substance behind it. While the concepts covered won’t be new if you’ve followed the authors or other critics of the current AI push, like Timnit Gebru, it was a great collection of the information in one place. If you haven’t been paying attention to them, then it is definitely worth reading for a perspective that is often missing from coverage of AI companies and products.
Scott Boehmer 