“Talk about technology is an addiction,” writes Joanna Russ. She continues:
An addiction is a situation of constantly escalating need—in short, an insatiability. Not only that, but the cause of the escalation is the satisfier of the need.
Russ, To Write Like a Woman, page 28
Insatiable seems an apt description for the moment. Doomscrolling is a kind of insatiability, an act that can never complete or resolve. Likewise: talk of so-called AI in terms of its “existential” risk. Russ again:
First, the addict is the ideal customer.
Second, addiction is a beautiful and effective method of social control. It is especially good at obfuscating and confusing—in political terms, mystifying—what it is the addict really needs.
From the point of view of profits, the perfect stimulus is one which satisfies a human need only briefly or partially, and at the same time exacerbates the need.
Russ, To Write Like a Woman, page 28
So we talk about about how AI will kill us, and it seems like we’re doing something, but then ever more terrible news emerges and the talk carries on. Meanwhile, all of the potential horrors ascribed to a future AI are in fact real and present today, but have been (are being) enacted by humans. We need not contemplate how an AI could infiltrate an organization and turn it to its own ends when—today—we have chatbots encouraging people to commit suicide. We need not speculate about AI taking all of our jobs when—today!—the same humans peddling AI are also laying people off right and left. We need not prophesy a future in which a rogue AI murders people en masse when—today!—we have humans making the choice to fire missiles at schoolchildren. Talk of a god-like AI that needs to be constrained projects our present fears into a hypothetical future, one that can only be addressed with more talk; meanwhile, we neglect our obligations to name and prosecute war crimes that have already happened. Casting AI as the monster-to-come obfuscates the monsters already in our midst.
Hiding grayly behind that sexy rock star, technology, is a much more sinister and powerful figure. It is the entire social system that surrounds us: hence the sense of being at the mercy of an all-encompassing autonomous process that we cannot control. If you add the monster’s location in time (during and after the Industrial Revolution), I think you can see what is being discussed when most people say “technology.” They are politically mystifying a much bigger monster: capitalism in its advanced industrial phase.
Russ, To Write Like a Woman, page 36
This is the same point that Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer will make, fifty years later, in Why We Fear AI. If there is anything novel about the language of AI (and I’m not convinced there is), it’s not the mystification of capitalism or the threat of a power out of our control or the manner in which technology is used to obscure human choices and human agency. It’s that we seem to have forgotten how to talk about anything else.