Facing a Changing Industry, AI Activists Rethink Their Strategy

In the spring From 2018, thousands of Google employees were pressure on the company drop An important artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon. The technology giant itself prompted In order not to use your AI for weapons or certain surveillance systems in the future.

The victory, which occurred in the middle of an unprecedented wave of demonstrations led by employees, helped inspire a new generation of technological activists in Silicon Valley. But seven years later, the legacy of this moment is more complicated. Google recently revised Its principles of Ethics of AI to allow some of the use cases that it is previously prohibited, and the companies in the industry are release New powerful AI tools at dizzying speed.

On Tuesday, the Ini Institute, a reflection group which studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, published a scanning On the current AI landscape, detailing the way in which power is concentrated in a handful of dominant companies that have shaped technology stories to their own advantage. The authors suggest new strategies on how activists, civil society groups and workers can take power in a radically modified environment.

The authors point out that the declarations of the figures of the technological industry say that the dawn of all -powerful superintelligence is just at the corner of the street – a development which they believe inaugurate a utopian era in which humanity can quickly find remedies against cancer or resolve climate change. This idea has “become the argument to put an end to all other arguments, a technological step which is both abstract and absolute that it wins the default priority on other means, and in fact, all the other ends”, write the authors of the report.

Among its recommendations, AI now urges advocacy and research groups to link AI problems to broader economic concerns, such as employment safety and the future of work. While the negative impacts of artificial intelligence were previously hidden or abstract for employees in many areas, stable career paths previously are disturbed in many different parts of the economy, from software engineering to education.

The authors see the opportunity for workers to resist how AI is deployed and to push the discussion points of the technological industry which frame the results as a widespread employment loss as inevitable. This could be particularly powerful in a political climate where the Republicans positioned themselves as the working class party, although the Trump administration is opposed to most AI regulations.

The authors highlight several case studies in the report where workers have succeeded in interrupting the implementation of the AI ​​in their companies or ensuring that the railings were set up. An example is National Nurses United, a union that has organized protests against the use of AI in health care and has conducted its own survey showing that technology can undermine clinical judgment and threaten patient safety. Activism has led a number of hospitals to institute new AI monitoring mechanisms and reduce the deployment of certain automated tools.

“What is unique at this time is this push to integrate AI everywhere. He grants technological companies and people who manage new types of power that go far beyond the deepening of their pockets, “explains Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the Now and one of the authors of the report. “We are talking about this deep social and economic and political reshaping of the fabric of our lives, and this requires a different way of taking into account the damage of the AI.”