What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
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It’s instructive that one of the mechanisms for perpetuating this ideology are chattering bots that speak both fact and falsehood in the same servile and confident tone, their makers unconcerned with the difference. In fact, their makers seem entirely concerned with obviating that difference, with disappearing distinctions between knowledge and ignorance, without which truth becomes entirely a product of power. Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.
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Intelligence has never been an objective quality that can be ascertained the way we measure the (actually increasing) carbon in the atmosphere. It is a political device that preserves power and care for those deemed worthy of it, and which simultaneously withdraws such care from everyone else. Its latest incarnation, with that modifier artificial, asserts its power through programs that wash accountability from the programmers: control, wealth, and power run up to founders and investors while harms run down to the rest of us with no possibility of redress.
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L. M. Terman, whose aim in creating the Stanford-Binet IQ test was to weed out undesirables, remarked that:
The evolution of modern industrial organization together with the mechanization of processes by machinery is making possible the larger and larger utilization of inferior mentality. One man with ability to think and plan guides the labor of ten or twenty laborers, who do what they are told to do and have little need for resourcefulness or initiative. (Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 212)
This has always been the intention of AI, and where its connection to the intelligence-rankers of years past is cruelly apparent: if those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity. I think of the engineers and designers who have spent decades honing their skills, deepening personal and public creative practices in service both to the users of the systems they built and to their own brilliant spirits, now being told to park themselves in front of a sycophantic oracle that can be appeased only through rote dictates, and which never tires of lying even as their own minds and muscles atrophy from disuse. What is being automated here: the work or the people?