I’ve been traveling a lot recently and in Venice last week I wandered into an architectural exhibit celebrating a prize-winning project called Calculating Empires by two academics, Kate Crawford of USC Annenberg and Microsoft Research and Vladan Joler of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia. Their exhibit, spread over dozens of large boards, depicted the growth of technology and power since 1500.
It charted the history of weapons, from gunpowder to the nuclear bomb and beyond to microdrones and autonomous cyberwarfare, and the message I got—it was impossible not to—was that, given the patterns of the past and barring a major change in human behavior, could lead to all-out nuclear war. Chilling stuff.
I also learned that Kate Crawford was among the early scholars of artificial intelligence and critics of the dangers of that technology in the hands of the wrong people. In 2021 she published Atlas of AI with Yale University Press. It is a history and analysis of artificial intelligence that, as I read it, was meant as an urgent warning that AI had too quickly become entrenched among America’s billionaires and military contractors as they sought to reshape and dominate the world economy.
Crawford’s book is dense but eminently readable. She argues that control of AI should not be left, as it has been, in the hands of retired American generals and billionaires whose top priorities are to put the immense power of advanced technology into improving weapons and to rake in enormous profits.
What follows is a preliminary account of the major points Crawford covers in her book. Two further
essays will hone in on specific largely unforeseen potential consequences.
Link : https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-and-its-secret?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1377040&post_id=173463689&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=l7odh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
