WHAT IS THE
POLITICAL AGENDA OF AI?
“The
hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam
mill society with the industrial capitalist,” Karl
Marx once said. And he was right. We have seen over and
over again throughout history how technological inventions
determine the dominant mode of production and with it the
type of political authority present in a society.
So what will
artificial intelligence give us? Who will capitalize on
this new technology, which is not only becoming a dominant
productive force in our societies (just like the hand mill
and the steam mill once were) but, as we keep reading in
the news, also appears to be fast escaping our control?
Could AI take
on a life of its own, like so many seem to believe it will,
and single-handedly decide the course of our history? Or
will it end up as yet another technological invention that
serves a particular agenda and benefits a certain subset
of humans?
Recently, examples
of hyperrealistic, AI-generated content, such as an “interview”
with former Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher,
who has not been able to talk to the press since a devastating
ski accident in 2013; photographs showing former President
Donald Trump being arrested in New York; and seemingly authentic
student essays ‘written’ by OpenAI’s famous
chatbot ChatGPT have raised serious concerns among intellectuals,
politicians and academics about the dangers this new technology
may pose to our societies.
In March, such
concerns led Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, AI heavyweight
Yoshua Bengio and Tesla/Twitter CEO Elon Musk among many
others to sign an open letter accusing AI labs of being
“locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy
ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not
even their creators – can understand, predict, or
reliably control” and calling on AI developers to
pause their work. More recently, Geoffrey Hinton –
known as one of the three “godfathers of AI”
quit Google “to speak freely about the dangers of
AI” and said he, at least in part, regrets his contributions
to the field.
We accept that
AI – like all era-defining technology – comes
with considerable downsides and dangers, but contrary to
Wozniak, Bengio, Hinton and others, we do not believe that
it could determine the course of history on its own, without
any input or guidance from humanity. We do not share such
concerns because we know that, just like it is the case
with all our other technological devices and systems, our
political, social and cultural agendas are also built into
AI technologies. As philosopher Donna Haraway explained,
“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of
what we make, and it’s inside of us.”
Before we further
explain why we are not scared of a so-called AI takeover,
we must define and explain what AI – as what we are
dealing with now – actually is. This is a challenging
task, not only because of the complexity of the product
at hand but also because of the media’s mythologization
of AI.
What is being
insistently communicated to the public today is that the
conscious machine is (almost) here, that our everyday world
will soon resemble the ones depicted in movies like 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and The Matrix.
This is a false
narrative. While we are undoubtedly building ever more capable
computers and calculators, there is no indication that we
have created – or are anywhere close to creating –
a digital mind that can actually ‘think.’
Noam Chomsky
recently argued (alongside Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull)
in a New York Times article that “we know
from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge
that [machine learning programmes like ChatGPT] differ profoundly
from how humans reason and use language.” Despite
its amazingly convincing answers to a variety of questions
from humans, ChatGPT is “a lumbering statistical engine
for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of
data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response
or most probable answer to a scientific question.”
Mimicking German philosopher Martin Heidegger (and risking
reigniting the age-old battle between continental and analytical
philosophers), we might say, “AI doesn’t think.
It simply calculates.”
