I am an optimist. Nevertheless, I currently find it disproportionately difficult to imagine positive futures. I’m always accompanied by the same feeling: It’s all downhill from here. The man-made climate crisis is destroying the planet, tech companies are becoming more and more powerful, housing will soon be unaffordable. A large part of my future scenarios are based on damage control, not on bold utopias.
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Damage limitation, I know that all too well from my activist work on the subject of digitization. I work day in, day out to avert the greatest possible harm: discrimination, surveillance, you name it. Tech companies have long taken the opposite stance. They told us how great the future is going to be for all of us thanks to their products. But the wind has turned. Not a week goes by now that tech companies don’t warn us about overpowering AI systems and a dystopian future instead of announcing great utopias.
(Bild:
Oliver Ajkovic
)
As a co-founder of the feminist organization Superrr Lab, Julia Kloiber works on just and inclusive digital futures. She regularly publishes her column in the print edition of MIT Technology Review.
What began with an alarming letter from Silicon Valley is spreading. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says AI often keeps him awake at night, philosopher Yuval Harari predicts nothing short of the end of mankind, and Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, is pushing for a tougher one before the US Senate regulation of AI. They all use narratives that have worked for thousands of years: the apocalypse is approaching, save yourself if you can.
Dangers that the systems already harbor today
It is their corporations that are pouring billions into the development of this technology. They get coverage, their company names are in the media non-stop, they meet heads of state. They present themselves as saviors. What frustrates me most: With their warnings of a bleak future, they put into perspective the dangers that these systems already harbor today: discrimination, exploitation and surveillance. Instead of speculating about future risks, companies could address them here and now. But social justice isn’t that shiny.
In moments when these scenarios overwhelm me, a very sober – some might say cynical – view of things helps me. Before AI systems wipe out humanity, it’s us humans who can pull the plug. Perhaps the issue will also be resolved without our intervention: while we allow ourselves to be distracted by supposedly all-powerful AI systems, the climate apocalypse will strike and flood the data centers. I’m distracted for a moment, but in the end that leaves me frustrated too. The warnings from the corporations may be exaggerated, but they stick with us so well that they shape us: they become self-fulfilling prophecies.
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Visions of just futures
We’ve been so preoccupied with damage control for decades that we’ve failed to craft alternative narratives about the digital future. Stories that focus on the well-being of society and not the well-being of corporations. We have no answers as to what hopeful futures look like in which we have overcome the climate crisis and AI hypes. What makes a happy life in 20, 50, 100 years? What must we do today to prepare the ground for sustainable and just futures? If we want to counter the current narratives of tech companies, then we need visions of fair, positive and diverse futures. Stories that are so memorable that they in turn become self-fulfilling prophecies, overwriting the dystopian futures.
(jl)
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