Talk of the Bay from KSQD
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The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
In this interview, Len Beyea gets a download from tech experts Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of The AI Con, about the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under the banner of “AI”, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors, helping the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answer to these questions, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna make clear, are “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With Emily Bender, Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. Drs. Bender and Hanna also run the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, tearing apart AI hype on their livestream and podcast. Alex has published widely, including in the journals Socius, Sociological Science, Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and has been a featured speaker at top-tier computer science conferences. Emily M. Bender, co-author of The AI Con, has been a member of the faculty at the University of Washington since 2003. She is currently the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the faculty director of the Computational Linguistics MS program and the director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. For 2019-2022, she was the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professor. She is an Adjunct Professor in both the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School at UW, and a member of the Tech Policy Lab, Value Sensitive Design Lab, and RAISE. Dr. Bender has served on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics as VP Elect, VP, President and Past President. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior to joining the faculty at UW, she held positions at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and worked in industry at YY Technologies. She received her PhD in Linguistics at Stanford University. She earned her AB (also in Linguistics) from UC Berkeley, and also studied at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.
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