Rebuilding the world but in whose image? The cost of AI’s utopian dream

AI ethics, & the continuing struggle over AI power

“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” — Christian Lous Lange

While I was deep into drafting a post on AI and the future of work in the face of automation, my best friend interrupted me with an urgent phone call. She was eager to share that Timnit Gebru, incidentally her compatriot, had published another article titled ‘The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia Through Artificial General Intelligence.’ For those familiar with the field of AI — especially the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the controversies surrounding them — you might recall Gebru. Her highly cited, co-authored research paper, ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’ (written with Emily Bender and others), led to her controversial departure from Google in 2021.

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness…

This incident has captured my attention for some time, making me keen to see…