Yarden Katz - Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence

A pall of sadness becomes almost a constant presence for anyone who wishes to revisit the corrupt association between American science and race in the centurythe nineteenthwhich ended with the appearance of moving pictures. In a better world, a world so different from the one this science helped to create, one might avert ones eyes. But good manners are a luxury which these scientists forfeited, willfully and frequently. They gave little quarter to those whom they regarded as their inferiors, dismissed and hounded those critics whom they could not summarily dispatch, and thoroughly enjoyed their social standing and each other.

Cedric Robinson

A rtificial intelligence (AI) is capturing many minds. The famed physicist Stephen Hawking said the creation of effective AI may be the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst. AI has become a global media phenomenon.

An industry of experts from the academic and policy worlds has emerged to interpret AIs significance. According to the experts, AI could grow the economy and free people from labor burdens, help address climate change, remove the bias from the courts of law, automate scientific discovery, reinvent journalism (and hence democracy), and potentially produce, not long from now, superhuman intelligent machines that may launch new civilizations across the galaxy.

As is often the case with matters concerning science and technology, the ensuing conversation has been largely ahistorical. Many are willing to ponder the awesome benefits or perils of AI, but few ask what it actually is. And even if we presume to know what it is, why is it being talked about so much now? In other words, what were the developmentspolitical, material, and otherwisethat made AI a mainstream focal point?

To the extent the latter question arises, it tends to be shrugged off as obvious. The ready-made answer is purely technical: larger data, faster computers, more advanced algorithms. These breakthroughs have supposedly led to a state where machines rival, and may soon exceed, the capacities of human thought.

A received wisdom thus formed: AI is a coherent and powerful force, made possible by recent breakthroughs in computing. It is a force poised to change everything, to bring about utopia or disaster. For reasons elaborated in the pages that follow, this received wisdom, like so many others, obscures the phenomena it purports to explain. Moreover, the fact that these critical questions about AI are hardly raisedyet conversations continue at full speedseems as important to making sense of AI as anything having to do with computers, data, or algorithms.

The mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota noted that every concept is a drama which conceals the backstage of its constitution, a drama that followed a tortuous path of remembrance and oblivion, through cataclysms and reconstructions, pitfalls and intuitions and finally arrived at a construct, the object, which naively believes itself to be independent of its past. This book is an attempt to step away from the self-evident discourse on AI and into the backstage of its constitution. I want to read AIs present through its past and by examining the political and ideological projects served by its reappearances.

The term Artificial Intelligence was coined by the American mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy in the 1950s. It quickly became an evocative label for an academic field, a concept, and an industry. AI often drew great media attention. Yet this pursuit was also under scrutiny by both computing insiders and invested outsiders. Critics asked: Was AI a science? Or simply a quest to automate well-defined tasks of industrial production? And when would AI deliver the human-level intelligence in machines that invested military patrons so desire? According to conventional accounts, this skepticism led to the so-called AI winter (typically dated to the 1980s), a period when interest in the endeavor had purportedly waned. Recent commentators say AI has recovered at full strength, entering an eternal spring.