Description:

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender, and sociologist Alex Hanna, make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.

Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, and Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), will be in conversation with Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director of DAIR. DAIR is an interdisciplinary and globally distributed AI research institute rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes it can be beneficial.