Please join Hagen Blix for a presentation, celebration, and discussion of their new book, Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares, which will surely keep us up at night. Hagen will be in conversation with David Widder.
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.
Hagen Blix (he/they) is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy.
David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His recent research has been accepted to FAccT, Nature, CSCW, and Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, Wired, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against police terror and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running. You can engage with him on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.