Disabling Intelligences: AI’s Eugenics Problem is Our Eugenics Problem

Abstract:  Eugenics is more than a failed social movement, driving debunked and outdated race science. Eugenics was and remains a collection of beliefs that persist throughout our societies, undergird our scientific inquiry, and shape our public policy as well as our interpersonal relationships. I explore how implementations of AI systems manifest many kinds of eugenics, from overt to covert, through the concept of Metaeugenics—the internalized beliefs that drive eugenic behaviors at the personal, interpersonal, and political levels. A new digital divide is forming between those that have the privilege to opt-out of artificial services and those that are forced into the labor that sustains them. This proliferation is enabled by a metaeugenic worship of intelligence and a belief that most people do not possess enough of it. Our collective belief in our own inadequacy is required to sustain the AI project. I prepare attendees to critically evaluate the motivations and consequences of the emerging and pervasive AI systems which claim to sell us a utopia while sustaining personal and environmental devastation. I provide an analytical tool for understanding the premises of an AI project, unmasking its false promises, and, within the bounds of your role in relation to this project, devising the possible actions you can take to build a better world.

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