Resources: Artificial intelligence

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so, argues this version of an essay published in Socialist Register 2021, is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.

Confronting the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s subtleties of style and construction, critics and other readers often resort to phrases like “distillation,” “economy,” “tamped-down force,” “muted power,” “the unsaid speaks,” “magical” and “how is it done?” But the brimming sense of life that Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender, and recognition.

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.

The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes, artificial intellligence – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environmental issues.