What’s the right way to talk about AI?
Yesterday I came across this article in the Atlantic, written by Matteo Wong, entitled The AI Industry is Radicalizing.
It makes a strong case that, while the hype men are over-hyping the new technology, the critics are too dismissive. Wong quotes Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s new book The AI Con as describing it as “a racist pile of linear algebra”.
Full disclosure: about a week before their title was announced, which is like a year and a half ago, I was thinking of writing a book similar in theme, and I even had a title in mind, which was “The AI Con”! So I get it. And to be clear I haven’t read Bender and Hanna’s entire book, so it’s possible they do not actually dismiss it.
And yet, I think Wong has a point. AI not going away, it’s real, it’s replacing people at their job, and we have to grapple with it seriously.
Wong goes on to describe the escalating war, sometimes between Gary Marcus and the true believers. The point is, Wong argues, they are arguing about the wrong thing.
Critical line here: Who cares if AI “thinks” like a person if it’s better than you at your job?
What’s a better way to think about this? Wong has two important lines towards answering this question.
Ignoring the chatbot era or insisting that the technology is useless distracts from more nuanced discussions about its effects on employment, the environment, education, personal relationships, and more.
Automation is responsible for at least half of the nation’s growing wage gap over the past 40 years, according to one economist.
I’m with Wong here. Let’s take it seriously, but not pretend it’s the answer to anyone’s dreams, except the people for whom it’s making billions of dollars. Like any technological tool, it’s going to make our lives different but not necessarily better, depending on the context. And given how many contexts AI is creeping into, there are a ton of ways to think about it. Let’s focus our critical minds on those contexts.
mathbabe 
Corporate Software Serving Corporate Agendas
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As someone that is working to deploy AI within Enterprise, Gov and University systems. Thank you for helping me to look at this from other perspectives and I just got the kindle version of Alex Hanna’s book. In my experience there is a rush to deploy AI, often without any information on how people are working today and what this means for workflows – and thus caring about the impact on the people that have devoted themselves to the firms.
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Overall, I agree. Much of what is written and published on Al focuses on LLMs and writing, but is that because that is the aspect of Al that’s threatening writers? Who is writing about all the other jobs being lost to Al?
Much “work” these days produces nothing but carbon dioxide and billionaires. The planet would be better off if we all did less work. Al has the potential to let us all work ten hour weeks like we were promised in these 1950s World Fairs, but of course, it won’t. It’ll be used to make us all work harder for less money while enriching billionaires and destroying the planet.
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AI is a tool, and like any tool, it is good for some purposes and terrible for others. It’s been a godsend for medicine and biochemistry, speeding up the process of identifying useful compounds and modeling their potential effects, interactions, and drawbacks to an amazing extent. But it’s also being misutilized — and the biggest issue is that the true cost of using this tool (which is HIGH!) isn’t being borne by the people who use it for asinine tasks (Claude, write an email for me in 2 seconds that I could write in 2 minutes if I set myself to do so.) The way many people use it, it’s like giving a kindergartener Thor’s hammer and letting them swing away at anything and everything — you end up with a whole lot of damage and not very much improvement from a tool that, in knowledgeable and well-taught hands, might produce a beneficial result.
I don’t want it taken away from the research sector that has made such amazing advances with it. But it is too expensive in terms of resource use to be in general circulation. Unfortunately, I think that ship has sailed… so we’re going to have to figure out how to contain the damage. The tech industry definitely got too far ahead of itself in releasing this technology into the wild when it wasn’t ready — but then, the people at the top of the industry are greedy ****s, aren’t they.
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