Machines of Caring Grace - Boston Review

Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today. Image: Getty Images The goal should be to support humans, not to replace them. Terry Winograd Morozov poses a provocative question, asking how AI might have been directed to different ends than the ones that drive the runaway industry today. As with any technology, we need to question both the technical imperatives and the underlying human values and uses. In the words of the decades-old slogan of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, “Technology is driving the future. . . . it is up to us to do the steering.” Morozov also accurately points out the dominant role of the “Efficiency Lobby” in steering the direction for AI so far, as well as many other modern computing technologies. The question to be asked from a socially meaningful point of view, however, is not where else we could have gone in an alternative world, but how we move forward from here. That is not to say that

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