Anthony Elliott

Making Sense of AI


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computational power underpinning self-driving vehicles – is far more questionable than much of the current debate recognizes. It is worth noting that sceptics rarely develop this criticism in any systematic fashion, and for the most part skirt altogether the broader issue of digitalization impacting economic and manufacturing transformations throughout the world today.

      Other sceptics, writing about AI from a broader cultural or philosophical perspective rather than only about marketing or hype, have suggested that we live in an age of diminished intelligence. Our worries and anxieties, as Jaron Lanier notes in You Are Not a Gadget, reflect the spread of techno-futures which exclude the human.1 Technological culture, from social networks to complex algorithms, is viewed from this perspective as a complex of values and ideologies which imperil human intelligence and ways of life associated with humanism. The inflation of intelligence which is ‘artificial’ is thus part of the story of a post-humanist age, in which humanity threatens to disappear into the algorithmic bent of technology itself. At the core of this sceptical account there lies a conception of AI as absolute integration, the melding of man and machine. AI is taken to express the expanding scale of a technological culture which seeks to transcend the quotidian affairs of the human, the subjective or indeed the merely personal. AI manipulates reality for its own self-serving ends, and reality, in the brave new world of algorithmic culture, strips selfhood of any kind of interiority for its own self-interest.

      The three distinct positions on AI sketched above tend to be linked to varying standpoints on technology and its impact on economy and society. According to these sceptical interpretations, the evolution of technology moves both with and against the grain of historical progress. But nothing at the level of technological innovation, it is argued, can be transformative of the economy unless it somehow takes its cue from culture and the wider, resourceful, reflective responses of human agents. For many sceptics, AI disturbs and disrupts, because the technological advances it ushers into existence have been largely unforeseen, thus taking the world by surprise. By roping AI firmly within those industrial practices associated with modernity, however, sceptics conclude that AI is unlikely to have any major or lasting impact upon the very social order of which it is the product. In short, this is a business-as-usual scenario in terms of economy and society. The three different positions recognize, to some degree, that what we witness today are significant differences between newer and older techniques of production and manufacturing. Yet sceptics reject as intrinsically flawed the idea of AI dissolving the boundary between the real world and the digital universe. It follows from this that there are also other ways in which these three sceptical positions on AI intersect. The idea of AI as creating a novel way of life – generating changes in lifestyle patterns – is viewed by sceptics as a massive public relations campaign to advance the commercial interests of tech companies. Similarly, arguments that intelligent machines can increasingly perform tasks once imagined to be purely the domain of human agents do not get much of a hearing from sceptics.