On Bullshit Engines’ Politics
摘要
The contemporary world has become increasingly entangled with so-called artificial intelligence—systems that seem to replicate human speech and thought, proclaiming to make our lives easier, more efficient, and more interesting. But what do these tools and systems actually do, and how do they do it? What systems of power, politics, and other values are embedded within these systems, and who put them there? Throughout this chapter, I take inspiration from and deploy Langdon Winner’s theories of how politics are embedded within and reproduced by technologies. Specifically, I use Winner’s framing to examine values embedded and entangled with “AI” and how those entanglements lead to what has already occurred, and what can potentially go wrong when we integrate “AI” into various aspects of our lives. This discussion and exploration then form the basis for recommendations as to how we might build these systems differently—that is to say, how we might go about building into these systems the values and politics we want to see rather than the ones we allow to make their way in via our uncritical assumptions and unexamined biases. Neither “AI” qua “AI” nor the kyriarchal, hegemonic, environmentally damaging, capitalist, white supremacist, ableist, eugenic, misogynistic, and otherwise prejudicially biased forms these tools and systems currently tend to take are inevitable. Racist facial recognition, sexist and ableist resumé and hiring tools, and other “AI” systems do not care about the harms they perpetuate or the truth content of their determinations—that’s what makes them bullshitters. To change these kyriarchal systems’ configurations, we must understand what they truly do, why they are the way they are, what values they reproduce and reify, and how they could be otherwise.