AI Wants Our Energy.

and other things I learned at the Ai and Us talk at Pioneer Works

Wednesday night I went to Pioneer Works in Brooklyn for a talk about AI. The series, or maybe it was the talk, was titled AI and Us. The title alone spoke to me, as I’ve always believed technologies are meant to serve humanity, yet most conversations are about how we serve our technology.

The talk featured two speakers, Professor Ruha Benjamin and Professor Kate Crawford, and a moderator/ host, Joshua Jelly-Schapir. Their biographies are on the Pioneer Works website.

I was in awe of both women’s eloquence and point of view. They center humans amidst the bewilderment and marketing of artificial intelligence, which is quoted as neither artificial nor that intelligent.

Professor Ruha Benjamin offered alternative definitions of AI that still have me ruminating. Ancestral Imagination is what we inherit inside our data, and the framework of today, and that it will take our Abundant Imagination to change these systems into systems that work for bettering society. How can we imagine visiting Mars? It feels out of grasp to ensure every human is fed and housed. This perspective stuck with me and had me thinking about how these narratives are not the ones we inherit, we are told it’s too hard to make change within our societal systems, and we’re using the technology to achieve impossible feats that very few people want while the masses are suffering, why not center our technology on humans rather than robots.

The woman spoke about the etymology of Robots and how closely it is related to that of slaves. It’s Czech—Robota, which means forced labor. And what systems are we bringing these inanimate objects into, and does that mean equity? It’s a lot to consider.

Professor Kate Crawford mapped how the data centers that power today’s AI are already starting to compete with humans for finite resources. The post-apocalyptic films missed the motivation for why the AI wants humanity dead. It needs the same water and energy to survive. It exacerbates climate disasters, which are already accelerating due to technology emissions. The war for resources has begun. Virginia data centers already use nearly 50% of the state's power.

So, what is AI’s data centers taking our power and water for? So that ICE can go through your social media, your free speech and label you an enemy of state? If we lift the hood and look at labels, it loops back to our inherited ancestral data. The biases towards free thinking, towards different appearances, and how we are not just going to repeat our history’s most disgusting atrocities, we’re going to do it in record time and with precision.

But all of this being said, AI has the propensity to do as much good as it can harm. If we can imagine a world we want to live in, AI can help us achieve that. But it’s a mirror of our dreams and our nightmares. I prefer to spend my time shining my light on the dreams. On a world where I don’t have to fear being Jewish, where beauty is linked to your essence and not your outer shell. Where everyone has a full tummy and a roof over their heads. Where power isn’t tyranny but the current that drives society to live in sync with the planet, that fuels my fiction and hopefully a roadmap to rebuild what our leaders are destroying. As terrifying as it is to watch our leaders destroy the systems that took so long to build. Those systems weren’t perfect; maybe once they self-destruct, we can harness an abundant future for all.

When Pioneer Works links to the talk, I’ll add it here.