Sinister design - part eight: AI

You can read part seven by following this link.

People polarize even on technological issues. Politics and the media, as usual, are grateful.

Take the debate on the social impacts of so-called artificial intelligence.
As Kate Crawford points out in her Atlas of AI, there are two dominant views of technology: one utopian, the other dystopian.
So people tend to line up, more or less, in the two corresponding camps: on one side, those who see AI as a source of universal solutions to any problem; on the other, those who fear the advent of the so-called "singularity," the superhuman intelligence that will enslave us.

Polarized, as usual. And, as usual, victims of oversimplifications of a complex reality, which, on top of that, doesn't need to wait for some more or less distant future to unleash the chaos it's made of.
The effects of AI, which this polarization tends to distract general attention from, are in fact already here, right now: reckless use of mineral, water, and energy resources, exploitation of underpaid labor, extraction of private data without consent, as well as classification of that same data along dimensions that serve the interests and needs of political, economic, and military power, thereby reinforcing existing inequalities and injustices and generating new ones.

It's the same old story: citizens polarize around appealing, easily understood visions set in the future, while the very thing they're polarizing over gets used against their interests in an underhanded, opaque, and, above all, immediate way.

You can find the other installments of the "Sinister design" saga by following this link.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.