UC Berkeley recently discovered a fund established in 1975 to fund research into eugenics. Nowadays, our (avowed) perspective on this ideology has changed, so they repurposed the fund and commissioned a series on the legacies of eugenics for the LA Review of Books.
In her piece for the series, Ruha Benjamin explains how the eugenicists of the early 20th century considered their work to be progressive. She compares this to the current eugenicists who also coat their TESCREAL ideas in the language of betterment.
Benjamin has a scathing and wide-ranging critique of effective altruism, longtermism, and the related artificial (general) intelligence prognosticators (we’ve warned about those ideologies earlier, too). For example, she points out the incongruity between being convinced that artificial intelligence will solve the climate crisis while simultaneously expending tremendous amounts of energy for creating this computing infrastructure.
With reference to an article by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, she shows “that the discriminatory attitudes of past eugenicists (racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the [Artificial General Intelligence] movement, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power under the guise of ‘safety’ and ‘benefiting humanity’.”
See: The New Artificial Intelligentsia at LA Review of Books.
Image from the original LA Review of Books article.