🏢 Beyond corporate-first AI imaginaries

Throughout 2023, we in the AIxDESIGN community found ourselves increasingly disillusioned with the prevailing discourse and narratives around AI.

The central narratives around emerging AI technologies today are being shaped by Big Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta – with for-profit products such as ChatGPT dominating our idea of what this technology is, can be, and most likely will be in the future. In some ways, “Silicon Valley's most powerful monopoly may be how we perceive technology.”

GROWTH

These dominant AI narratives and development are heavily influenced by the interests of big tech companies - primarily growth, profit, and stakeholder value, the usual capitalist objectives. It is sometimes said that “the problem with AI is the problem with capitalism”.

IMG: Ben Grosser's redaction poetry version of Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto

TESCREAL

Beyond that, there’s the underlying ideologies and beliefs of people leading and funding said developments. Their taglines of “AI to benefit all of humanity” are intended to sway the public in its favor with ideas of ‘a promised land’ as this VOX article sharply notes sounds a lot like ‘religion, repackaged’. A recent paper by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres bundles some of the underlying ideologies driving the agenda towards AGI (artificial general intelligence) in particular into the TESCREAL acronym, clearly labelling these beliefs and tracing their origins back.

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged.

The TESCREAL Bundle

DISCOURSE

While there’s promises of a better tomorrow, there is at the same time a lot of fear-mongering and panic circulating of AI ‘replacing us’ or ‘going rogue’ as well as a growing awareness of the actual harms and risks of AI displacement, bias, and environmental impact to name a few.

Struggling to reconcile these two stories and the nuance in between, the discourse around AI, both in media headlines and day-to-day conversation, often falls into polarizing positions:

👍 with techno-optimist / hype / utopia on the one hand

👎🏻 and doomers / criti-hype / dystopia on the other

This binary framing of two warring visions isn’t fertile soil for constructive conversations, leading people into false debates, and fails to capture the nuanced and complex realities of how AI is shaping our lives in both utopic and dystopic ways all at once.

Not resonating with either of these options, we try to practice a third position that exists in the in between; acknowledging a plurality of (at times, juxtaposing) truths, and focusing on our agency within them.