‘We can call bullshit on their eugenic futures’

“Billionaires building bunkers to survive an AI apocalypse, attempting to disrupt death through cryopreservation, scouting the planet for pop-up cities and network states — are not reliable stewards of the collective good.”

— Dr. Ruha Benjamin

I highly recommend this talk from Dr. Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In "Who Owns the Future? The Artificial Intelligentsia & the New Eugenics," Benjamin delivers a searing assessment of what's at stake as Silicon Valley billionaires move to seize control of every lever of power.

(She mentions my work on the Network State at about 31 minutes in!)

Click below to watch Part One of her Tanner Lecture at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center:

Powerful quotes from her speech:

• “The future imagined by AI evangelists is meant only for a small sliver. The rest of us will be left clamoring to survive on this boiling planet. Alternatively, we can call bullshit on their eugenic futures and listen instead to the collective intelligence of the people...who have been the consistent and courageous voices calling out the archaic visions of faux futurists purporting to save humanity.”
• “Behind their duplicity lies a familiar calculus: If AI evangelists can convince us that artificial general intelligence is possible, imminent, dangerous — we might be compelled to entrust our fate to them. Hype and doom, in other words, are two sides of the same Bitcoin.”
• “We have a choice. Do we continue worshipping at the feet of the artificial intelligentsia, self-appointed stewards of our collective future, those manufacturing techno solutions for problems that they themselves help to create?”

Coincidentally, we discussed Dr. Benjamin’s work on the most recent episode of the Nerd Reich podcast. Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III mentioned her book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. And Dr. Émile P. Torres said her work had deeply influenced his own path as a critic of tech ideology.

Click below to watch that segment:

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