Robots are Racist

pirate wires #94 // breaking down the work of our media’s favorite AI ethicist, our last defense against the tech bros' genocidal superintelligence (not a thing, but ok LOL we're digging in)

Chappie

Making space for “AI ethicists.” Given the growing hostility of our anti-tech press, with its inevitable catalyzation of broad anti-tech popular sentiment, it’s no surprise the field of artificial intelligence has already attracted an army of critics. Partly, as I covered at the top of the week, the most virulent front is led by Bay Area rationalists, chief among them Eliezer Yudkowsky, who last week suggested provocation of a nuclear war is preferable to further development in the field, and any acceptable future must include the legal bombing of “rogue data centers.” But while the blackest blackpill of the bunch, Eliezer has written more cogently about AI risk, and for longer, than almost any other thinker, living or dead. Recent hysteria aside, he’s contributed a great deal to the field (if you can call it that) of AI safety. In keeping with the laws of Clown World, he is therefore unsurprisingly not the most influential anti-AI zealot in the crowded nascent cottage industry of anti-AI zealotry. In terms of ability to shape public sentiment, our mainstream press is still king, and there is no “AI ethicist” the press loves more than former Googler Timnit Gebru, who believes AGI is a white supremacist fantasy. 

As Timnit has quickly come to dominate most media perspective on the subject of AI safety, it’s unfortunately necessary to parse her work a little more closely. What follows is my summary of this important public figure’s recent thinking, which I intend to grant the same respect that she has granted the men and women actually working on AI.

Our story begins with Timnit’s strange reaction to the Future of Life Institute’s open letter demanding a moratorium on AI training, which is ostensibly what both Timnit and Eliezer want. But Timnit — like Eliezer, who she endlessly attacks, and persistently racializes — was not happy. Her stated reason: the letter “fearmongered,” which is an incredible claim given her recent implication AGI is rooted in literally genocidal aspirations. On closer examination, Timnit’s real issue with the letter seems mostly a matter of her enormous ego. These “white men” (her relentless, racist framing) were getting attention, and that attention belonged to Timnit. 

In one recent, typical example of her ire, after a blog post she didn’t like referenced Sam Altman: 

But if Timnit’s charge is somehow none of the ‘right people’ are getting enough “fawning” press, with the category of ‘right people’ presumably including Timnit herself, it would be difficult to comprehend, as there is no single figure in AI who has received as much “fawning” press as Timnit. A brief list of her many public laurels: One of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders (Fortune); one of the ten people who shaped science in 2021 (Nature); one of the most influential people in the world (TIME). Then there are the articles. 

Not too long ago, Timnit resigned from Google, an episode erroneously framed by every major press outlet that covered her resignation as a firing. To recount her departure in more specific terms, she wrote a list of demands, gave it to Google with a resignation letter that would imminently take effect if the company didn’t give her everything she wanted, and her bosses hilariously accepted her resignation. Timnit not only continues to lie about the fact that she quit her job, but frames her “firing” as “traumatizing” — not for her, but, incredibly, for other people of color. After her resignation, Timnit was defended everywhere from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to the MIT Technology Review, which does a decent job summarizing what is now her most notable work. She has since received heroic photographic spreads, with full-throated endorsements, from WIRED, and the New York Times. Her positions, until recently, have included the following: AI consumes a lot of energy (consumption of energy is bad), AI costs a lot of time and money (time and money should only be dedicated to Timnit’s preferred political projects), and AI is, by its nature, racist (because AI is a reflection of us, and we are all racist). 

Recently, Timnit’s thinking has evolved. No longer satisfied with a run-of-the-mill racism charge, her focus has shifted from AI to AGI (artificial general intelligence), and her opinion today is the entire AGI aspiration is eugenicist in nature. This brings me to one of the most remarkable artifacts of our batshit crazy discourse I have ever had the pleasure of discovering:

Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through AGI. 

Like, you just know it’s going to be good. 

Let’s dip in. 

Timnit’s argument opens with the strange admission she has only just heard of AGI, and didn’t realize people in the field cared about AGI until recently. This is strange, I say, because AGI — the kind of ultimate potential of AI — has been a part of the AI story, especially including the negative story, from the beginning. The name may have changed, but there has always been the fear and awe of HAL 9000, and not only in the world of tech. The superintelligent machine is obviously a major theme of pop culture. In any case, Timnit is on the scene with explanations.