The incredible Miriam Eric Suzanne published an article last week that's one of the most sobering, honest, damning, and powerful things I've read in a long time.
It's about tech and tools and hero worship, and how the whole fucking industry seems to content to support tools and the people who create them who are very much down with eugenics and trans-erasure.
TL;DR – This is a post about billionaires who love eugenics, support a pro-eugenics government, and sell us a product that they promise will help their longterm eugenic goals.
The whole thing is infinitely quotable, but I'd like to share a few choice selections here.
First, on the ethics of these tools…
The AI projects currently mid-hype are being developed and sold by billionaires and VCs with companies explicitly pursuing surveillance, exploitation, and weaponry. They fired their ethics teams at the start of the cycle, and diverted our attention to a long-term sci-fi narrative about the coming age of machines – a "General Intelligence" that will soon "surpasses" human ability…
Now they are eager to jump on board an authoritarian movement that wants to exterminate trans and disabled people, fire black people, and deport all my immigrant friends and colleagues.
It's wild to see major tech companies throwing out all pretense – giddy to abandon previous commitments around diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility. Run free, little mega-corps! Be the evil you've always dreamed for the world!
Surely this has nothing to do with their products, though.
Then there's this juicy morsel about the complete lack of actual use-cases for what's commonly sold as AI…
But the bigger issue is that they don't have to be successful to be dangerous. Because along the way, these companies get to steal our work and sell it back to us, lower our wages, de-skill our field, bury us in slop, and mire us in algorithmic bureaucracy. If the long-term space god thing doesn't work out, at least they can make a profit in the short-term.
The beliefs of these CEOs aren't incidental to the AI product they're selling us. These are not tools designed for us to benefit from, but tools designed to exploit us. To poison our access to jobs, and our access to information at the same time.
And the real chef's kiss for me is this bit about how downright enthusiastic so much of our industry is around these tools that have been explicitly designed to hurt you…
I can relate to that sentiment, but many in our community seem unfazed or even excited about 'AI' and 'agents' and 'codegen' and all the rest of it. As far as I can tell, most of our industry is still on board with the project, even while protesting the changes in corporate politics, or occasionally complaining about the most obvious over-use. There are certainly a number of people raising alarms or expressing frustration, but we're often dismissed as uninformed.
Based on every conference I've attended over the last year, I can absolutely say we're a fringe minority. And it's wearing me out. I don't know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an "agentic" web? Assurance that we won't be left behind?
Before I end up just copy/pasting Miriam's whole article here, just head over and read the whole thing yourself.
It's incredible, and deserves your attention.
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Cheers,
Chris
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