Hey, AI Week at Baylor is coming! And to judge from that webpage, Baylor is the place to be if you want to feel really good about the giant AI companies. But if you want to think about
- how those companies — especially now that OpenAI is abandoning its nonprofit status — follow in the footsteps of other recent Silicon Valley juggernauts in striving to make every human being on the planet utterly dependent on their services
- the grossly unethical practice of harvesting and re-using, for profit, the words and sounds and images that human beings have labored their whole lives to make
- the massive environmental damage that is sure to come from the ever-increasing demands for energy from the AI companies’ enormous server farms
— well, I don’t think those issues are being raised.
Whatever AI might be in some imagined utopian future, AI companies in our present moment extract and exploit — ecologically, ethically, and humanly. This is simply what they do, intrinsically, necessarily — in a perverse sense of the phrase, on principle. A Christian university ought to be saying so, or at the very least should be putting some challenging questions to our new AI overlords. We’re not going to achieve that utopian future without first confronting the largely dystopian present.
Also: I think instead of teaching our students how to use whatever Silicon Valley happens to be selling them we should be teaching them how to tend the digital commons. And the issues about attention and reading I’ve been talking about forever — see for instance this talk from a decade ago — are even more urgent now. But none of this is on Baylor’s radar, as far as I can tell.
