Why we fear AI
Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer
Our fears about AI might tell us more about class struggle today than technology in the future.
Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent. Hence, Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer argue, we need to understand these fears in terms of the political threats and opportunities in the current moment, rather than a distant future. From surveillance and automation, to the nature of tools under capitalism, Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer explore the role of class in the dreams and nightmares people have about AI.
The aim of Why We Fear AI is radical and simple: to develop political analyses and counterstrategies that highlight the divergence of material interests in high-tech digital capitalism, and thus provide fruitful ground for a class-based politics around these new technologies—and new worlds.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Author: Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335174
Published: March 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 5.5 in X 8.5 in
Page count: 224
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence / Capitalism / Surveillance
About THE AUTHOR
Hagen Blix is a cognitive scientist, whose research is at the intersection of language, cognition, and political economy.
Ingeborg Glimmer is an AI industry researcher working on natural language processing, and state-of-the-art large language models like ChatGPT.
Excerpt
When we speculate about future autonomous technology, we are prone to extrapolate from our experiences of the only form in which technology is autonomous today—as capital. The will we imagine such future technology to have, will be colored by the “will” we have experienced until today: the will to profit. Now, as technology starts to “talk” to us, speculations about its intentions (communicative and otherwise) will draw on this. The two gaps—the nonexistent willer behind the will, and the nonexistent author behind the text— get identified with each other, as if that made them exist.
What we will explore in the remainder of the book, then, is a suspicion: that speculations about future artificial general intelligence are often, really, speculations about AI models as capital. That when we imagine an author behind the artificially generated text, we imagine it as the willer behind the will to profit. That we may be anthropomorphizing, not just a technology, but capitalism itself.