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Regulating AI, Or Things Don't Have to Be This Way Just Because They Are This Way [1]
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Date: 2023-03-14
The Washing Post has an excellent profile of Chris Gilliard, a community college professor who has been pointing out the need to regulate and ban bad algorithmic and artificial intelligence technology:
Far from academia’s elite institutions, Gilliard, 51, has emerged as an influential thinker on the relationship between trendy tech tools, privacy and race. From “digital redlining” to “luxury surveillance,” he has helped coin concepts that are reframing the debate around technology’s impacts and awakening recognition that seemingly apolitical products can harm marginalized groups. While some scholars confine their work to peer-reviewed journals, Gilliard posts prolifically on Twitter, wryly skewering consumer tech launches and flagging the latest example of what he sees as blinkered techno-optimism or surveillance creep. (Among his aphorisms: “Automating that racist thing is not going to make it less racist.”) It’s an irony of the world Silicon Valley has constructed that an otherwise obscure rhetoric and composition teacher with a Twitter habit could emerge as one of its sharpest foils. Chris Gilliard aims to abolish Silicon Valley’s surveillance machine - The Washington Post
I strongly encourage you to read the entire thing. It is an excellent look and an extraordinary person, but the heart of the piece is this quote, I think:
“One of the arguments people like to make is that you can’t go back on particular technologies — you can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Gilliard says. “That’s patently untrue. No one would look at asbestos and say, ‘Well, you can’t outlaw chemistry.’ But they look at facial recognition and say, ‘You can’t outlaw math.' ” Chris Gilliard aims to abolish Silicon Valley’s surveillance machine - The Washington Post
One of the most powerful tricks the Silicon Valley businesspeople who impose these "solutions" on us use is the idea that these tools are somehow in a new class, somehow inevitable. Nothing could be further than the truth. So-called artificial intelligence, algorithms, and all related classes of technology are just that -- technology. They may look new and shiny, they may have the new car smell, but a the end of the day they are just technology. They have not been handed down from God, etched by lightening into two stone tablets from on high. Human beings have created them, just like human beings have created every other technology we have ever used.
And the only question that has ever mattered with technology is whether or not that technology benefits society at large. If it does, then we allow it to continue. If it does not, then we control it or ban it, just as we did with the chemicals that destroyed the ozone layer or DDT or asbestos. Our Silicon Valley conmen want us to just accept that because they have managed to temporarily impose their will, their specific technology, upon society that we have to accept that technology forever and ever, amen. We don't. We can and should fight back. It is our society, not just theirs. And if their technology poisons our society then, just as we banned patent medicines or leaded gasoline.
Silicon Valley produces nothing special in the long view of history. Don't let them convince you otherwise.
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