I think that's interesting and newsworthy. Maybe because we know it already it seems obvious, but a younger generation might not understand how deeply enmeshed the military-industrial complex was (and to some extent still is) in academia.
Okay, but is it an okay topic for a history podcast like the one sobellian was apparently listening to?
> You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
> I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.
> And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.
> ...And in effect, replace God with science?
To me, it felt as if the piece was dripping with contempt for people that actually started the work on the basis that they were nerds with the wrong identity.
To every extent, I would counter. It's incredibly rare that a person is currently involved in STEM research at a university and some sort of US Military grant isn't providing at least some amount of funding to it/them.
My university for one allowed students to view comprehensive data about grants provided to research groups (after much internal campaigning), but absolutely refused allowing that data to be accessed by the general public. The reason was obvious when you looked at the data: 70%+ of the bucks came directly from various militaries.