On evitability and questioning technological determinism
“AI is not a trend. It's not going anywhere, and pretending that it won't exist anywhere, it's not going to stop the progress. It's only going to leave you behind.”
– Mohini Dey, bass guitarist, producer, arranger, and vocalist
This is a sentiment I’m sure you’ve encountered by now. Maybe you heard someone say it in an interview or podcast. Maybe a friend said it to you. Maybe it’s something you’ve said yourself.
Leaving aside the truth of this claim for a second, I wonder if we can get curious about the certainty expressed in it. The determinism behind it. Where does this feeling of inevitability come from?
In this excellent video, Adam Neely makes a solid case that this idea can be traced back to how tech leaders like Mikey Shulman (cofounder of generative AI music creation platform SUNO) and Marc Andreessen (venture capitalist at a16z) talk about their products. At the risk of stating the obvious, they promote the narrative that AI is unstoppable because they have investors to attract. A car salesman in the 1910s would be quick to tell you that highways are an inevitability.
What’s more, tech businessmen have little incentive to speak openly about the potential risks and fallout from their products. Why would they? Why give oxygen to any narrative that suggests that AI is, in fact, evitable?
So yeah. Companies like SUNO are pouring marketing dollars into content that implicitly or explicitly suggests that AI is a done deal. Dey herself (who is quoted above) appears in many SUNO promotions. In order to turn a profit, they need adoption at scale. In order to achieve adoption at scale, they create content that asserts AI is being adopted at scale. They are trying — and probably succeeding — at fulfilling their own prophecy. Pretty wild.
So here’s a list of things someone might find themselves believing about AI:
It deskills skilled labor.
It atrophies critical thinking.
It makes the act of creation less social and more narcissistic.
Its adoption and widespread use are inevitable.
It feels sort of insane when I put these things next to one another. Seems like a recipe for a bad future.
Why do I bring all this up? Because I’m interested in how we get to the good future. And I think part of getting there is understanding how we get to the bad one.
It seems to me the bad future arrives when people aren’t willing to have honest, non-disingenuous conversation around proposed solutions to our problems. The good future depends on openness to a better idea, and it’s stymied when people decide that conversation is over. The good future does not require us to convince our fellow humans of an idea’s inevitability.
Look, maybe AI inserts itself into everything and becomes the new normal. But even if that is the future we get, it need not stop us from thinking honestly about it. Is it the best solution to loneliness, or is it merely the most convenient one? Is it the best way to make music, or merely the most profitable one for a few companies? Who benefits from us believing those are the same thing? We can and should ask these questions. We can still be open to better ideas. The future never stops arriving.
Thanks for reading y’all. This post is essentially just me paraphrasing and referencing Neely’s video, so please do check that out in its entirety. I’ll leave you with this quote from Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science:
“When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it is because it is deeply unsettled. This promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they're going to be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future's already settled, then we will create that for them.”
Hope you’re swell. Good luck out there.
Recent Work
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I had never seen Cheers before this year, but that has been rectified thanks to this. Something light to put on while you cook.