Toffler - Appendage to the machine

Appendage to the machine

Artificial intelligence is increasingly seen as a new form of mind directing human work and play. But where is it exactly, and why does that matter?

What comes to mind when you think of artificial intelligence (AI)? Perhaps it is the way retailers curate offers in your shopping basket – if you liked this, you’ll like that? Or perhaps it is the highly intelligent machines that are being programmed to defeat human opponents in games such as chess and Go?

The likelihood is that you will think of it as some kind of calculating machine, possibly in the cloud, or hidden in some device.

AI myths

That common-sense view of AI is beginning to be challenged. It relies on two common interdependent myths that are both prevalent in the way the industry thinks of itself and, therefore, how it is explained in the marketing and media that surrounds it. First, non-human intelligent systems are analogues of human minds.

Since the 1950s, this way of thinking across computers and minds has dominated the way people understand their cognitive powers. But both human and machine intelligence happen somewhere physical – and a body and circuit board are not the same thing. Second, intelligence, wherever it resides, is seen as context independent. AI’s calculative rationality is generally seen as a strength – except when it goes wrong, of course.

Kate Crawford, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, puts this focus on a machine’s mental aptitudes like this: “It is the ideology of Cartesian dualism in artificial intelligence: where AI is narrowly understood as disembodied intelligence, removed from any relation to the material world.”

Atlas of AI

Her recent book Atlas of AI takes a view informed more by the sociology of science and technology. The atlas of the title refers both to a physical and conceptual mapping of the many places AI intersects with our lives. Looked in this way, Crawford argues, AI is better seen as an extractive industry.

In the geographical landscape, lithium mines extract the raw power needed in everything from smart phones to electric cars to run AI systems – not to mention the huge drain on water data centres place on local communities because of the need to regulate the temperature of machines.

In the workplace, AI’s increased powers of surveillance, detailed task management and time keeping externalise the rapid, computer-based and sleepless labour power of machines into the real world with unhappy results for the increasing legions of low-paid micro workers around the globe.

Manifesto

“The worker becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him,” she writes, quoting Marx and Engels from their Manifesto of the Communist Party.

By situating AI in the broader frame of society, Crawford invites readers to think about the wider environmental, social and governance issues surrounding the increasing use of AI tools – a dimension often lacking in many risk assessments. Her aim is not to simply criticise AI, but to help change it for the better.