Why A.I. Should Be Owned By Everyone

Because we created it, because we feed it—and because it's feeding on us.

Link to video

The link above is for the second edition of All For All, my new series of weekly half-hour commentaries/lectures for Professor Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work channel.

The premise? The term "AI" is a manipulative and ideologically charged misnomer. This technology is the collective product of billions of human beings over many years. It should belong to us, because we created it—and because it is already endangering us.

Keywords

Here are the topics AI thinks it heard about itself in this talk:

Artificial intelligence, democratic socialism, Friedrich Nietzsche, large language models, collective authorship, data mining, environmental impact, exploitation, fossil fuel technology, privacy concerns, military AI, existential threat, public utilities, compensation, addiction.

Excerpts (very slightly edited)

From the introduction:

I am going to make the case that AI is this kind is an inherently socialist technology, therefore it must be governed socialistically …

Whatever your economic philosophy, I hope to convince you that that AI should be owned and governed by everyone ….

From a critique of Yuval Harari and others who distract us with talk of “superintelligence” and existential threats:

In this 5100-word interview (with Harari) some words don’t appear at all: equality, inequality, poverty, war, occupation, fairness …

… It isn’t superintelligence. It's collective intelligence, yours and mine.

From a discussion of the technology’s present-day risks, like worsening inequality and environmental destruction:

It's very interesting that Yuval Harari doesn't mention war, given that he's based in Israel … Military AI is already an “existential threat” to the people of Gaza.

Israel’s targeting AI was described as “a mass assassination factory” (whose) real function was to generate rationales, however thin, for bombing civilians and infrastructure.

So. apparently, AI is outpacing humans already in at least one arena: the mass production of homicidal bullshit.

From the conclusion:

The public deserves to own its creation. Instead, we've been made servants of it.

And lastly:

I hope that rethinking the way we look at AI programs will be the first step to toward rethinking the way we look at a lot of our economic and political power relationships. But either way, the fight for this technology is a fight for the future.

Let me know what you think …