Huh, I wonder where all the “keep politics out of technology” people are on this one.
I wonder if they even realize this is politics.
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This is why discussions of AI as a technology cannot be separated from •who• is behind the technology: who makes it, who controls it, who profits from it, who gains power from it.
There is no “just stick to the technical capabilities and leave politics out of it” when the •actual technical capabilities• are directly formed by human power struggles outside of technology.
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…and technical capabilities are •always• formed by such power struggles among humans. Technology is not something that arrives from an alien spaceship or that congeals spontaneously from the alternate dimension of pure abstract ideas. Technology is made by humans for humans.
By •which• humans? For •which• humans?
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Miss those questions and you’ve missed the whole story. If you’re not thinking about that, you’re just a tool of the people who are.
Because I •guarantee• that the people who’ve accumulated enough power and resources to exert large-scale influence over the shape of technology understand •perfectly well• that they are shaping human society’s shared decisions about the distribution of power and resources.
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“Politics” refers to the processes and activities that groups of people use to make shared decisions about the distribution of power and resources.
When a company prioritizes a specific political party, that’s politics. When a company chooses to harm or to protect a specific subgroup of society, that’s politics. When a company decides to fund or eschew a specific technology, that’s politics.
And when an multibillion dollar AI vendor decides to give their technology free reign to plagiarize people’s work en masse and scramble entire job markets, but then decides to crack down on that technology when it infringes on •company’s• work and scrambles •product• markets…that too is politics.
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