Technopolitics

This week on my podcast, I read Technopolitics, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the degree to which AI’s politics are baked in or historically contingent.

These sins are baked into this kind of AI production. There is no way to raise trillions in subsidies that allow AI companies to sell computation at a subsidy that amounts to selling $100 bills for $1 each without also insisting that the end state of all of this is that every job will be swallowed by a chatbot. You can’t raise trillions on this promise with­out “blitzscaled” data-centers – accompanied by climate-shredding gas turbines. You can’t raise trillions without cramming AI into every part of every person’s digital life, without any safeguards for how vulnerable people might use them to sink deep into dangerous delusion.

These are the “technopolitics” of AI: To make this AI, the people in­volved had to inflict all these harms upon us. The important questions are: to what extent are these the necessary technopolitics of AI, and; can those technopolitics change?

Langdon Winner’s 1980 article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” is the Ur-text for questions like these. In this seminal essay, the rock critic turned tech scholar Winner demands that we move beyond the simple framing of tech having “intended” and “unintended” consequences, and instead insists that politics come baked into some technologies.

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