Technology

Toby Walsh’s The Shortest History of AI begins and ends with a sermon against panic. ‘Our children’, writes Walsh, ‘are set to inherit a worse world than the one we were born into, due to a raft of problems, some of which are caused by AI.’ The next couple of decades ‘will be challenging’. Yet Walsh is unequivocal in his faith: first, that artificial intelligence scientists will eventually achieve their final goal, ‘matching human intelligence in all its richness’, and second, that such a feat will be ultimately beneficial to humanity. The secret to such optimism, in the face of acknowledged ‘challenges’ ranging from racial and gendered bias to the ‘existential’, lies in learning ‘the lessons of the past’. And this book, writes Walsh, is not a bad place to start learning those lessons.

Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future recounts findings from a six-year ‘mission’ to ‘identify the villains’ in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Uncovering the history and future of AI through a feminist lens, Tracey Spicer puts the conservatism at the heart of these oft-touted ‘revolutionary technologies’ on full display. Spicer contextualises AI’s current omnipresence in a world ruled by money, the military, and men. Interlacing an impressive range of vignettes, Man-Made introduces the reader to everything from AI’s origins in women’s weaving, to racist soap dispensers, to Sexbots, to gaming, to driverless cars, to childcare robots, to the end of humanity.

Back in the day, I was wary about making a career in science. It wasn’t just the lack of women; it was also a sense of moving into alien territory. After all, I had absorbed feminist critiques suggesting that modern science had been shaped by (male) scientists’ urge to ‘penetrate’ nature by reducing it to its parts – an urge that had blinded them to the power of the whole. And I was all for the whole – for Gaia, the whole Earth, not for atom splitting and nuclear bombs. But it was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) that offered the most famous argument against reductionism. Carson pointed out that when scientists developed pesticides to kill specific insects, they didn’t take sufficient account of the knock-on effect on the environment, including the starved or poisoned birds whose absent songs would manifest in increasingly silent springs. Half a century on, we are aware of many examples of the damage reductive thinking can do, especially the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity, changing the whole climate in the process. In Here Be Monsters, Richard King deftly explores another area of concern, which he calls ‘technoscience’, a mix of science, technology, and neoliberal capitalism that reduces everything to its parts – to genes, bits of information, and individual consumers, losing sight of the whole person and their whole community.

We like to think that we would stick up for ourselves after being wronged. No one wants to be a coward. Often, though, faced with the realities of power, wealth, and superior resources, we shrink from the good fight. More worryingly, humans can misdiagnose or externalise an issue, rationalising it away. We take a problem grounded in interpersonal relationships, politics, or some other social arrangement, and convince ourselves it is an objective, natural state of being. After all, as distinguished artificial intelligence researcher and author Toby Walsh, author of Machines Behaving Badly: The morality of AI, says: ‘We are, for example, frequently very poor at explaining ourselves. All of us make biased and unfair decisions.’ 

Privacy crises come in waves, usually spurred by public panics over new technologies and their exploitation by those in power. In the 1890s, it was the evils of ‘instantaneous photography and newspaper enterprise’ that pushed Harvard jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to famously advocate for a new common law (‘judge made’) right to privacy. In the mid-twentieth century, the availability of the contraceptive pill set the stage for the US Supreme Court’s declaration of a constitutional right to privacy in the (now threatened) decision of Griswold v Connecticut (1965). Similarly, fears about ‘King Kong’-sized government data centres ultimately led to the passing of the US Privacy Act 1974. In her latest book, The Fight for Privacy, Danielle Keats Citron, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, paints a vivid and compelling picture of privacy now under siege by online invaders. She argues convincingly for a new US civil right to ‘intimate privacy’, and sets out a precise and practical path towards achieving it.

McKenzie Wark’s new book consists of 388 numbered paragraphs organised into seventeen ‘chapters’, organised in alphabetic order, from ‘Abstraction’ to ‘Writings’ and going through ‘Class’, ‘Hacking’, ‘Representation’ and the like. Wark is batting for a high score, as the opening sentence, with its breezy allusion to Marx, indicates: ‘A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction.’ One of the things the format of the book suggests – not simply with the numbered paragraphs (which invoke Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as Wark’s chosen model, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, 1967) but also the whole aphoristic style – is a throwback to those Big Bad Books that were out to blow up or at least transform the world, starting by changing the way we thought about it. In this it has something in common with John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), which seeks to convince us that humanism and anthropocentrism are grand delusions and that there is no way that man can be thought of as master of his fate. Wark isn’t nearly as apocalyptic as this, but he is pretty ambitious all the same. He is trying both to call into existence and to write the blueprint for a new class, the hacker class:

The internet, like its big sister, the electronic computer, is a Little Frankenstein of the Cold War – one of the countless bright ideas brought shuddering to life with the financial backing of the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the feverish aftermath of the launching of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, by the Soviet Union in 1957. And why did the US military finance the research and development of a medium that would, thirty years down the track, turn the Amazon into a cheap place to buy books and forever pervert the meaning of a humble can of Spam? In a word: Armageddon.