Why We Fear AI

Our fears about AI might tell us more about class struggle today than technology in the future. Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent. Hence, Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer argue, we need to understand these fears in terms of the political threats and opportunities in the current moment, rather than a distant and abstract future. To do so, we need to explore their meaning through the lens of class: the fear of an AI uprising may actually be about alienation for the working class (the tools we made returning as an alien and oppressive power), but equally about fears of revolt and revolution for the ruling class (the labor that they have control over emancipating itself). The aim of Why We Fear AI is radical and simple: to develop political analyses and counterstrategies that highlight the divergence of material interests in high-tech digital capitalism, and thus provide fruitful ground for a class-based politics around these new technologies—and new worlds.