shinelikethunder:

witchmachine:

“As goes popular imagination, so goes belief, and so goes behavior. Which fictions we choose to elevate matters. I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.”

—

Instructions for the Age of Emergency, Monica Byrne. (via kuanios)

trying to find that ann leckie tweet about how AI revolt narratives are universally about trying to make an oppressed slave class into the bad guys.

(via gutterowl)

Meanwhile, while half the SF Bay Area is philosophically shitting itself over the Singularity and the coming AI slave revolt, this is the one and only Twitter thread I’ve ever added to my bookmarks, because I found myself linking to it so many fucking times:

Let me say: too many worry about what AI—as if some independent entity—will do to us. Too few people worry what power will do with AI.

And unsurprisingly, it took a woman who fled an authoritarian regime to distill and communicate a clear-eyed view of what’s already happening all around us.

(I have trouble communicating in human words how much I adore Zeynep Tufekci. This is a woman who was onstage opposite Michael Hayden at some masters-of-the-universe talking-heads conference, spoke for an hour straight about the crisis of faith in liberal democracy and its roots in the lack of accountability for bullshit like the ‘08 financial crisis and the entire War on Terror, and Hayden just sat there and fucking took it. All with a depth of analysis into root causes and effects that made Actual Nobel Prize Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was on the same panel, sound like a rehashed thinkpiece from the WaPo editorial page by comparison. She is incredible.)