"Director Valerie Veatch makes the case that the rise of techno-fascism from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is a feature, not a bug. That may sound hyperbolic, but Ghost in the Machine, which is built around interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, historians and computer scientists, leaves little room for doubt. If you've been following the meteoric rise of AI, or Silicon Valley in general, Veatch's methodical deconstruction of the technology doesn't really unearth anything new."
"But even I was surprised to learn that we can trace the impact of eugenics in tech all the way back to Karl Pearson, the mathematician who pioneered the field of statistics, and who also spent his life trying to quantify the differences between races. (Guess who he believed was superior.) His legacy was continued by William Shockley, a co-creator of the transistor, an avowed white supremacist who spent his later years espousing (now debunked) theories around IQ and racial differences."
The pursuit of artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley trace roots to eugenics and racialized statistical thinking. Early figures like Karl Pearson developed statistics while promoting racial hierarchies, and William Shockley promoted white supremacist ideas that influenced engineering cultures. John McCarthy's AI coinage emerged within that milieu. Technological failures and harms reflect these foundations: Microsoft's Tay became a white‑supremacist chatbot, AI datacenters have severe environmental impacts, and companies rely on low‑wage global labor to train models. Prominent tech leaders such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel embody and amplify techno‑fascist tendencies through rhetoric and workplace practices. These combined forces make techno‑fascism a structural feature of the AI ecosystem.
Read at Engadget
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]