This essay by Phillip Wegner has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-12096000/406211/Don-t-Believe-the-AI-Hype-Big-Tech-s-Failure-of; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXTRACT:
In one of his most-cited observations, the late Fredric Jameson (1994: 12) notes, “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” A decade later, he recast his original observation in this way: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (Jameson 2008: 573).
Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s timely and important book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, makes a compelling case for just such a weakness of imagination in contemporary discussions of so-called AI…