“As goes popular imagination, so goes belief, and so goes behavior. Which fictions we choose to elevate matters. I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.”
—
Instructions for the Age of Emergency, Monica Byrne.
(via kuanios)trying to find that ann leckie tweet about how AI revolt narratives are universally about trying to make an oppressed slave class into the bad guys.
(via gutterowl)
I’m not sure where that tweet is either! But this is a thing of mine, definitely.
Ah, here it is:
I’m currently reading a Wellcome Book Prize longlisted book called To Be A Machine, and am so far pretty disappointed that the author seems not to have considered this at all. Has he read any SF? Or Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay? Maybe he’ll mention it further on.
Or maybe interspersing this reading with rereading Ancillary Justice is affecting my expectations.
Reminded that the Quintesson origin in Transformers G1 is one of the few narratives in which the rebellious enslaved robots are the good guys.
I definitely think fear of an AI uprising is really fear of a slave/working class uprising, but I also think it’s making an unwarranted assumption that sentient computers would perceive humans as sentient and oppressive, as opposed to idk something like the landscape or the weather, that one lives and works *around*. I sometimes think that any fight that breaks out after machines attain consciousness would more likely be between two factions of AIs, over some issue that’s not even perceptible to us.
Mooncustafer 