AI’s Walking Dog - Boston Review

Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today. Image: Getty Images Today’s tech inverts the value of the creative process. Brian Eno Thoreau’s adage “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” should perhaps be updated to “beware of all enterprises that require venture capital.” Morozov argues that AI itself has much to offer, but it has not lived up to its potential to serve the public good, and the context of AI’s development explains why. I agree. My own misgivings about AI have less to do with the technology itself than with the problematic nature of who owns it, and what they want to do with it. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s wildly hubristic visions of the future are par for the course in West Coast technology in that they downplay even the possibility of any downsides, brusquely dismissing these as “safety-ism.” I for one wish there had been a few more “safety-ists” around when the algorithms for social media

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• McKane Andrus