Third, and most importantly, by providing arguments against curbing the power of Big Tech companies, the book frames these companies as too important to the American national interest to regulate or to break up. This serves to bring Big Tech and academia closer together, further merging their interests and deterring meaningful dissent by a new wave of researchers critical of Silicon Valley. Second, they propose “solutions” that serve to vastly enrich tech companies, helping them to meet their profit and growth projections, while also funding AI-focused research programs at top-tier universities. The NSCAI report and The Age of AI serve Big Tech’s agenda through three rhetorical strategies.įirst, they position Big Tech’s AI and computing power as critical national infrastructure, across research and development environments, and military and government operations. must maintain AI supremacy or risk being eclipsed by China. In March, the NSCAI issued a report that echoed Cold War rhetoric to recommend $40 billion in federal investments in AI, warning that the U.S. In this way, The Age of AI should be understood as a companion to the work that the NSCAI has already done under Schmidt’s leadership. This book provides Eric Schmidt and his co-authors a new occasion for a well-funded PR campaign, during which they will be given opportunities to present their views to large audiences, and likely to brief policymakers and other political actors. Huttenlocher is also board chair of the MacArthur Foundation, which funds progressive nonprofits and initiatives focused on tech accountability. Over the last several years, he chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an advisory board to Congress and the Pentagon comprising Big Tech executives, military and intelligence professionals, and academic elites.ĭaniel Huttenlocher is the dean of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, an AI-focused mega-lab that was launched thanks to a $350 million gift from foreclosure profiteer and longtime Trump supporter Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of the investment group Blackstone. He’s also a billionaire and a philanthropist, whose Schmidt Futures underwrites positions throughout the federal government, and many tech-related civil society organizations and initiatives. He has worked over the last decade to encourage investments by the military and intelligence establishments in Big Tech infrastructures and to market their products, including Google’s AI technologies, as indispensable to U.S. The public is recognizing that it has a choice in whether AI is developed and widely adopted.Įric Schmidt is the former chief executive of Google and former executive chairman of its parent company Alphabet. exceptionalism, military dominance, and entrenching the military-industrial complex. Even at 98 years old, he remains an influential voice in foreign policy despite his sustained commitment to U.S. While the book’s intellectual contribution is marginal, the political agenda of its authors merits careful consideration. It presents AI as an entity, as superhuman, and as inevitable-while erasing a history of scholarship and critique of AI technologies that demonstrates their limits and inherent risks, the irreducible labor required to sustain them, and the financial incentives of tech companies that produce and profit from them. Its title alone- The Age of AI: And Our Human Future-declares an epoch and aspires to speak on behalf of everyone. The Age of AI works to take the debate about artificial intelligence off the table by obscuring the relevant technologies and the political economy behind them. At the same time, AI technologies are increasingly shown to be brittle, systemically biased, and applied in ways that exacerbate racialized inequality. In other words, so-called “advances” in AI celebrated over the last decade are primarily the product of significantly concentrated data and computing resources that reside in the hands of a few large tech corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
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