Real Education on Artificial Intelligence
This Week: Moral Complexity at MIT — with Susan Silbey, Sally Haslanger, Jonathan King and Yarden Katz. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
You might have missed the story about the student protest at MIT a week ago, maybe because it didn’t get any media coverage. Their ire was focused on the basket of deplorables in town for the dedication for the billion dollar Schwartzman College of Computing. Henry Kissinger and Tom Friedman were there along with finance mogul Steve Schwartzman, who gets the naming rights for his $350 million gift. This comes not long after Saudi Prince Mohammad Bin Salmon’s warm welcome at MIT last spring. A war criminal, a war salesman and a warmonger walk into a campus bar…
We met some of the students involved in last week’s protests; they’re terrific kids, just waking up to the politics of the institution they go to and the broader context of the applications of the technology that comes out of places like MIT. Maybe one of them could help design a kind of university ingredients list.
Our discussion with three faculty members was spirited. Anthropologist Susan Sibley, chair of the MIT faculty, did her best to convince her colleagues of the effort to include a humanities and social sciences component in the new college that will “embed an understanding of how technologies will affect human life.” On the phone with us this week she was honest — we might get it wrong, she says, but given that tech has progressed beyond our ability to control it, she’s all in for trying.
The others, philosopher Sally Haslanger and biologist and veteran of the 60s peace movement at MIT, Jonathan King, were angrier at the optics of having Kissinger and the Saudi prince in the mix and much more skeptical of the implications of the corporate money funding the place with its promise of “ensuring that technological advancements benefit all, ethically and humanely.”
Everything we know about AI comes from our friend Yarden Katz, a super-smart post-doc in systems biology at Harvard Medical School and author of an upcoming book on the history of the term. Here’s what he wants you to know when you hear those letters: A.I. is a nebulous label designed to suggest a cohesive, powerful and transformative force that’s already here, but really it’s just tech speak for existing neoliberal projects. And pay attention to the messengers, he warns, they’ve been designated as the “experts” who are privileged to to comment on how A.I. is going to structure society and affect every aspect of it. Basically A.I. just means bigger, faster computers. Once called Big Data, it needed rebranding after the Snowden revelations. And, as soon as you hear A.I. and ethics in the same sentence, reach for your gun!
Yarden convened “Whose University Is It,” a teach-in at the Cambridge Public Library this month, and he emailed us some final thoughts from the critic and tech philosopher Lewis Mumford.
“The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.
The danger to democracy does not spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian technics of our own day date back to a period before even the wheel had been invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence.”
Here’s Henry Kissinger’s warning about A.I. Here’s World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee’s regrets about his invention (thirty years old this week) and his plan to create a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots.
“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places…The increasing centralization of the Web has ended up producing — with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.” — Tim Berners-Lee
Speaking of anti-human, Michael Kimmelman’s front page New York Times review of Manhattan’s newest real estate venture, Hudson Yards, is a good read. Depending on your perspective, he writes, it’s either “a shiny new city ex-nihilo, a wellspring of future tax revenues and evidence of a miraculous, post-9/11 civic volte-face,” or it’s a “super-sized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent.” It’s an engineering marvel, or it’s a surface spectacle that “epitomizes a skin-deep view of architecture as luxury branding…as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.”
We toured the much more architecturally human Walter Gropius house last week ahead of our Bauhaus show coming soon. We’re also reading Tom Wolfe’s critique, From Our House to Bauhaus.
What we’re reading
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the racial politics of Michelle Obama’s Becoming. Maggie Nelson on Carolee Schneemann. Audrey Wollen on Marilyn Monroe. Jia Tolentino on athleisure. Claire Messud on Valeria Luiselli. James McAuley on the yellow vest movement. Paul Starr on Jill Abramson. Lauren Oyler on Netflix’s Dating Around. Thomas Nagel on Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals.
