I’ve published a book about AI, Class, and Capitalism together with my friend Ingeborg Glimmer. Its title is (a little tongue in cheek) Why We Fear AI. If you’re interested in what AI will do to politics or the future of work, check it out! You can read a sample here!

Description

Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than the technology of the future.

Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans off the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From professors to billionaires, from artists to fraudsters, from journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination.

Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.

Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fears about AI reflect different economic realities—from venture capitalists, to engineers, to artists, to warehouse workers. Truly understanding the potential impacts of AI means confronting capitalism and class, power and exploitation, in concrete terms. Only then can we fight the real threats to our lives, livelihoods, and the planet, instead of tilting at nightmare windmills.

Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of capitalism and its violent ways of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of insecure gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalists may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one in which our labor, knowledge, and technologies serve the people rather than capital.

Praise

“Blix and Glimmer take the reader on a deeply engaging, funny, and provocative tour through our deepest anxieties and darkest fantasies of an AI-dominated future. Why We Fear AI offers profound insight into how AI and capitalism today work in mutually reinforcing lockstep to deskill and devalue humans, and what it will take to wake up from our worst AI nightmares and build a better world.” — Shannon Vallor, author of The AI Mirror

“In this highly thoughtful book, Blix and Glimmer delve deeply into the histories of AI, capitalism and neoliberal bureaucracy. The result is disturbing and unsettling, a provocative launchpad for resisting the apparent truths of AI that businesses and governments are so keen to impose on us.” — Nick Couldry, co-author of Data Grab

“Why We Fear AI synthesizes and crystallizes what you need to know to think about AI in terms of a critical political economy, and it does so in a very interesting framing of this question of fear. Not just what is the political economy of AI, but also how that is connected to the vibe towards AI, to a cultural shift, to an understanding of AI as something to be feared, but feared in a lot of different ways. Those fears are multitude, and they are contradictory. Hagen and Ingeborg’s book uses that framing in a really interesting way to cast the political economy of AI, in a new, illuminating light.” — Jathan Sadowski, co-host of This Machine Kills and author of The Mechanic and the Luddite

Reviews

Matthew Kirschenbaum reviewed our book in Critical Inquiry