The news cycle around AI ‘doomsday’ or ‘fears of extinction’ talk over the past two weeks has taken up all the oxygen in the room.
This narrative push is a product of a well-resourced PR and lobbying machine driven by tech companies invested in ensuring AI regulation serves the interests of tech billionaires and the ruling classes, while simultaneously stoking fear to boost investment as GenAI companies like Claude and ChatGPT prepare for their upcoming IPOs.
In this WIRED interview with Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher who (alongside many others) has spent years researching and highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of the ‘AI safety and alignment’ debate, including relentlessly fighting back against Google, she reiterates important key points for the current moment:
- Equating an ‘intelligence’ breakthrough to the field of mathematics should be critically challenged. Timnit refers to the Leiden Declaration, which warns about what happens to the mathematical field if corporations weaponise it.
- This narrative push distracts from the actual harms the tech industry has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate. She cautions against getting too caught up in tech companies’ framing, which creates a fig leaf that leads folks and journalists to ask the wrong questions.
What’s really existential is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these. […] There’s another element where you’re so privileged that you can’t imagine other things harming you. Like if you’re not worried about police brutality, or floods, or warfare—things that can actually kill you—then you can obsess over the machine-god.
We are already experiencing and witnessing the realities enabled by tech companies and the ruling elites, from the overlapping climate crises created by building gas plants, energy, electricy and water disruptions and shortages due to data centres build out, to continuous violent extraction of minerals in Congo, and the increasing investments in militarisation, security, and defence that are actively destroying and killing people in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran. Real harms and consequences are happening across borders, and it will be exacerbated and disproportionately borne by working-class, indigenous, racialised, migrant, trans folks, people seeking asylum, and other vulnerable communities.
Instead of the doom and gloom, the antidote to despair is action. Many collectives and movements understand that our struggles are interconnected and are building coalitions, resisting, pushing back, and refusing these developments. Here are some examples:
- Say No to Blood Tech (boycott the new iPhone launch!), together with Apples Against Apartheid as part of Congo Action week in 18–24 October.
- Purge Palantir, a global movement against Palantir (here, here), global week of action 29 Sep–1 Oct.
- 120+ European trade unions and organisations against Palantir with a list of demands (here, here).
- No Tech for Apartheid, a worker-led campaign of Google & Amazon workers organising against the $1bn Project Nimbus cloud computing contract with the Zionist entity.
- Mass Action against Data Centres in Amsterdam.
See: One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’ at WIRED.
Image from the original WIRED article.