Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be

It's just bizarre to see how often this kind of weird psychoanalysis takes place instead of thinking about AI. Will it be "quite easy, if one wanted, to cause a great deal of harm"? Will modern AI put "'most' jobs at some degree of risk of elimination"? The author doesn't even bother to engage with the questions.

Journalists have been on the grievance-grifter gravy-train for a long long time, so we can expect unrelenting hostility to anything that redirects attention away from the lucrative "bias" narrative to any other issue.

> AI ethicists and researchers such as Timnit Gebru and Meredith Whittaker

Ooooh, I love their work !

Reading these histories together, we find that Babbage’s proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers are inextricably connected to the calculating engines he spent his life attempting to build. From inception, the engines — “the principles on which all modern computing machines are based” — were envisioned as tools for automating and disciplining labor. Their architectures directly encoded economist Adam Smith’s theories of labor division and borrowed core functionality from technologies of labor control already in use. The engines were themselves tools for labor control, automating and disciplining not manual but mental labor. Babbage didn’t invent the theories that shaped his engines, nor did Smith. They were prefigured on the plantation, developed first as technologies to control enslaved people.