Promises and perils

One of the just-so stories we keep hearing about AI is that it’s inevitable, that the technology is here and will continue to be here, and we better get on board or get left behind. These stories have the ring of a threat because they are, explicitly and otherwise, threatening. They are also familiar. Fear that there may be no alternative to the will of the AI arise because we have been told for decades that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, that there is no alternative to the mediation of all society by profit-driven markets, no alternative to the universal power of private self-interest that continually tries not to better the world, but to maximize it’s own profit and hence power. Stories about the “promises and perils” of AI ring true, not because the AI is poised to hunt all of us down, but because the stories reflect real experiences of technology, capitalism, and ideology; they reflect the capitalist developments of the incomprehensibility of technology, the…