On The Hook - Emily M Bender Isn’t Falling for the AI Hype Machine

Today’s guest is Emily M Bender. She was recently in Sydney from Seattle to talk about her new book that she wrote with her co-author Alex Hanna called The AI Con; How to fight big tech’s hype and create the future we want. She’s a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and received her PhD from Stanford, Time Magazine included her as one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence globally, has her own fantastic podcast called Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 and has been featured in The Guardian, New York Times, Fast Company, The Atlantic and the Financial Times.

Emily’s work has arrived at a coincidental time for me personally as I feel stuck between the competing interests of faster documenting and faster emailing and faster writing and faster everything with a keyboard - most simply, the alluring optimism of my very own assistant or aid or partner or doer to free me of the banalities of using my brain when that is what my professional career has been entirely about. This set of conveniences hits up against a technology that reminds me in many ways of how fossil fuel companies talk about fossil fuels. Grandiose pretensions that the answer has arrived, that they hold the cure to a life free of burden, inconvenience and effort. Then throw in the gargantuan impacts artificial intelligence has already and will continue to have in terms of carbon emissions - at a time when we have barely zero runway before we cross the 1.5 degree threshold, plus the substantial labour abuse issues and the ways by which AI deployment is super charging the system it learns from and therefore perpetuates bias, discrimination and violence against those already experiencing bias, discrimination and violence. Add in how scams, fraud, deep fake pornography, misinformation and disinformation being accelerated and the big hype machine runs into some legitimate questions of its net benefits and costs.

The AI Con brought into a sharp focus the trade offs that need to be considered between whatever immediate personal benefit I think I may be getting against all of the known harms. And that’s entirely presuming the technology does what it says, doesn’t hallucinate and is built for the context it’s being applied to.

Emily articulates her critiques with a sharp accuracy and examines the adverse impacts to people in great detail, going beyond the noise and hype and wealth generation potential of the latest technology here to save us from the laborious nature of labour. In this chat we discuss all of this, but also the role of meaning and connection as humans, the history of articifical technology as a concept and also how you can go about becoming more informed and asking the right questions in how you navigate a world where the pressure to keep up is relentless and the fear of falling behind is real.

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