Hagen Blix, Ingeborg Glimmer

Why We Fear AI

On the Interpretation of Nightmares

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than technology in the future. Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans of the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From academics to billionaires, artists to fraudsters, journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination. Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.  Science and tech industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted, and arcane world of AI nightmares in order to demystify what people say about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble, and show how fears about AI reflect very different economic realities: from venture capitalists to AI engineers, from artists to warehouse workers at Amazon. If we want to understand the fears and potential impacts of AI, we must think about capitalism, the economy, and class power in real terms we can confront and wage our struggles on. Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of the violence and alienation at the root of capitalism and its way of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalist may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one where our labor, knowledge, and technologies serves us, rather than us serving capital and its owners.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Common Notions
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. März 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781945335174
• ISBN-10: 1945335173
• Artikelnr.: 69930586

Autorenporträt

Hagen Blix is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy. 

Inhaltsangabe

Part I – Today’s World, Today’s AI
1. Introduction
We introduce recent advances in AI and a number of public reactions to
them, ranging from hopes that they will “solve climate change” or “automate
science” to fears that they will enslave or even exterminate humanity.
2. Capital, Will, and Artificial Intelligence
Discusses the only form in which technology has hitherto been “autonomous”:
as capital with a drive towards profit. This drive exists as a structural
condition beyond people’s individual control and desires––but with modern
language models’ arrival, we can project it onto a particular technology.
Hence, when we anthropomorphize AI in our fantasies, we may be
anthropomorphizing our experience of capital(ism).
3. There is No Alternative (Resistance is Futile)
Our experience of information technology dovetails with that of being
governed under neoliberalism. We trace this technological development from
the first transistors to modern AI. The increasing specialization of
technological knowledge correlates with an increasingly
technocratic-specialist approach to politics. Hence, the imaginations about
AI are prone to reflect a particular experience of governance.
Part II – (Dreams + Nightmares) / Class
4. Saving the World and the End of Politics
AI is already a tool used for surveillance, control, manipulation, or
deskilling, and capitalism is already destroying the planet and our future
ability to live. This is reflected in fears people have about these
technologies becoming more powerful (whether they are imagined to be
“sentient” or not). We highlight how speculations about future AI as seen
from the perspective of working people, reflect life under
neoliberal-technocratic capitalism.
5. Which Side are You On?
On the one hand, the technocratic nightmare of the working class is the
dream of the class that produces the means of control necessary for such a
system (and which appears to them as exercising their agency to make
society more ‘rational’)––hence, when they imagine the same benevolent AI
that “saves the world,” as the working class does, it does not reflect a
lack of agency, but its apex. On the other hand, the same technologies
expose a new potential for deskilling the professional class itself, thus
threatening to morph into means of controlling them, rather than simply
being the means of control which draw them to the side of power.
6. Aristotle’s (Fever) Dreams
Capitalists dream of realizing Aristotle’s justification for slavery in
ancient Greece––that “natural slaves” understand reason but do not possess
it––through technological advancement. They dream of leaving the rest of
humanity behind, of becoming one with capital in the form of immortal
machines. They dream of developing the means of production through
automated science without scientists, through a twisted version of science
that lacks the possibility of critique. Today, it is crucial to claim the
narrative, to tell our stories, to do our class politics.           
Part III – Where We Go From Here
7. Technofascist Dangers
Where we discuss the dangers that arise out of the professional class
responding to their nightmares, instead of the actual threats. We will
focus on how the paternalism of technocratic movements like “Effective
Altruism,” which merely veils violence with faux care, provides fertile
ground for worries about “extinction risk” from AI. In some of these
outgrowths, the nightmares discussed so far get combined with a series of
colonialist and white supremacist arguments. The goal of this chapter is to
lay these things bare, and offer strategies to make the professional class
reconnect with reality instead of ideology.
8. Seizing the Means of Prediction and Other Opportunities
We try to lay out the possibility of having AIs not as capital, but as
collectively owned means of production and distribution. We address the
situation from the perspective of the professional class (whose ambiguity
comes with dangers, but also opportunities––they have genuine reason to
join the struggle, if they can be made to see through the obfuscation), and
the working class. We discuss what might be necessary to get to a world of
collective ownership (organizing the collective agency that is currently
lacking), and why the myths we’ve discussed might actually help to make
clear the issues and dangers that we face, if we can seize the moment.