Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia | Hacker News Reader

Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia

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45 pointsgmays23 comments

Being against the "uncritical adoption" of just about anything seems like pretty much common sense, which is admittedly often not common.

Obviously? Maybe respond to the contents and not just the title of the article?

Show the Ellison and Blair interviews to your students. They are not even hiding their agenda (interviews start at 9:29):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BLZ3pmQTZA

"Citizens will be on their best behavior." (almost exact quote)

"We will use these wonderful technologies to gather and connect data about everyone." (paraphrased)

> And like the communists of old, AI scientists believe in their revolution; the old myths of tragic hubris don’t trouble them at all.

What an utterly bullsh*t way to say I don't know anything about history nor how world works.

The one line you've pulled out is a quote from someone else and not the words of the authors of this paper, to be clear.

Here's the full context:

  1 Overview
  The culture of AI is imperialist and seeks to expand the kingdom of the machine. The AI community is well organized and well funded, and its culture fits its dreams: it has high priests, its greedy businessmen, its canny politicians. The U.S. Department of Defense is behind it all the way. And like the communists of old, AI scientists believe in their revolution; the old myths of tragic hubris don’t trouble them at all.
  Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow (1985, pp. 13–14)
  This paper sets out our expert position on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies permeating the higher education sector, demonstrating how this directly erodes our ability to function (see also our Open Letter, Guest, van Rooij, et al. 2025).
  (the rest elided)

I was surprised to learn it's a quote from 1985.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, you might want to consider reading about the “AI winter”. To me, it’s not surprising at all that the quote would come from 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

The book can be bought here: https://www.minotavrosbooks.com/pages/books/011217/tony-solo...

Other's also voiced their concerns at the time:

Sherry Turkle https://monoskop.org/images/5/55/Turkle_Sherry_The_Second_Se...

Tom Athanasiou ghostwrote Hubert Dreyfus's book 'Mind over Machine' (1986) https://www.ecoequity.org/about/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...

Athanasiou, Tom (1985). “Artificial intelligence: cleverly disguised politics”. In: Compulsive technology: computers as culture. Ed. by Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow. Free Association Books, pp. 13–35

Carl Mitcham https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222771271_Computers...

Other articles citing these early critics:

Special Issue Artificial intelligence through the lenses of Marxism and critical thinking https://periodicos.ufs.br/eptic/article/download/21789/16168...

Artificial intelligence and the ideology of capitalist reconstruction https://ouci.dntb.gov.ua/en/works/lRaVX6M4/

maybe the person you're responding to used chatgpt to extract a section of text to be critical of it? lol

I just had a conversation with free chatgpt about when a sports game started. Chatgpt got it hilariously wrong, like a time it couldn't possibly be given the other things I know about the game. I just didn't want to trawl through search results to find out, so thought AI could be a nice shortcut. Mistake, I guess. Then I tried to tell it how and why it was wrong, with further hilariously wrong attempts to respond from the AI. I couldn't help but give a few more pointless clarifying replies, even though I knew I would get nothing out of it and the AI would learn nothing. I seem to do this every month or so and then get frustrated with how useless it is and then swear off it for another month.

Did you ask it to search the Internet as a part of your request? It is still extremely imperfect, but that typically helps it get basic details correct. At least for me at any rate.

Wow it's just as stupid and ahistorical in context! Every revolution's fighters believed in it despite the utter catastrophe that came about afterwards. The only reason to point to that instead of, idk, Belgium's capitalist turn leading to the crimes against humanity in the Congo, is to score points with credulous burgers.

"just like the bad-thing-doers of old, today's bad-thing-doers believe what they're doing is actually good" is a keen insight in itself when broadly applied, but useless for distinguishing bad things from good things.

When people say communists you can safely just skim over it, its a meaningless word shaped by 50+ years of the most expansive propaganda project in human history. It is just a synonym that means "bad people" it has no substance beyond that.

It is not meaningless for me, who was born into a one-party state ruled by the Communist Party which proudly called itself as such.

If I wanted to be cheeky, that's your privilege showing :) There are likely some people in your proximity (if you are American, then mostly Cubans and some Russians) who have lost some family member to actual Communism.

That's more like explicit propaganda by some ancestors of cuban landlords that felt the stick after the revolution, what I meant is politically uneducated normies randomly throwing in the term in an unrelated article.

a. You probably mean descendants. The ancestors are long dead.

b. "felt the stick", what an euphemism for large-scale human rights violations, and not limited to "landlords".

Friends, from a survivor (a favorite word of the American left, ain't it?): actual Communist rule is very bad, most nations abandoned it in the very moment that it was possible to do so, and in the places where it can't be done, people at least try to flee.

That is why you have so many Cubans and Venezuelans in that horrible capitalist America, but not one American risks his/her life trying to swim or sail into those working class paradises.

Even in Europe the old Iron Curtain worked in one way only, to prevent people from escaping their working class paradises, although in the GDR it was called "anti-fascist protective wall".

I really don't care about your victor narrative of history, its all meaningless at this point, all this propaganda only purpose nowadays is purely to justify why we can't have the most basic social democratic reforms, it has nothing to do with anything even remotely marxist.

And how does that experience shape your views on the uncritical adoption of AI technologies?

I am wary of their misuse for production of really slick propaganda. One of the weaker spots of the old regimes was that their propaganda was becoming unbelievable. The contrast between glorious posters of the classless future and shabby, decrepit exteriors of the cities that were falling into dysrepair was huge.

AI can probably produce better propaganda than mediocre party hacks.

Capitalist countries have quite a body count as well if that’s how we want to judge things.

Hard to take seriously a paper that begins with a statement that the “uncritical adoption” of combustion engines was a “blunder” by scientists.

The uncritical adoption - and continued dependence on - combustion engines could end up resulting in the collapse of civilization as we know it, and that’s not even the worst case.

If we had been capable of less uncritical adoption - including taking stronger measures to limit CO2 output - we would be in a better position today. So that was a blunder by society as a whole, with scientists playing an important role in that.

The first paper describing anthropogenic CO2-driven global warming was published in 1896. But as a whole, most scientists completely ignored that for nearly a century - plenty of time to have taken corrective action of all kinds. That was a blunder.

Someone replied to the above comment and then deleted their comment. Since I went to the trouble of writing a reply, I’m posting it for other people who may not realize this. Starting with a partial quote of the deleted comment:

> “No one has a crystal ball. […] it wasn't clear in 1896 or even 1996.”

It was clear long before 1996. I personally was aware of it as being essentially settled science by 1992, but I was far from on the leading edge of that, and my knowledge came from mainstream media. But the problem was that there was huge and even funded resistance to accepting it.

Just for example, Time Magazine published articles about anthropogenic global warming as early as 1939, the year after Guy Callendar published a paper titled “The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature.”

Time covered the subject several times after that, in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s, eventually publishing an issue entitled “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth” in 1989. Here’s a quote from that issue (https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,956...):

> “According to computer projections, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere could drive up the planet's average temperature 3 degrees F to 9 degrees F by the middle of the next century. That could cause the oceans to rise by several feet, flooding coastal areas and ruining huge tracts of farmland through salinization. Changing weather patterns could make huge areas infertile or uninhabitable, touching off refugee movements unprecedented in history.”

The fact that we continued to essentially ignore the issue for decades after that was a blunder. It has nothing to do with “not knowing enough about complex dynamic environments.” Anyone who genuinely believes that has most likely been strongly influenced by the oil industry propaganda on the subject.

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