"AI models have one undeniable virtue: the increase in speed and efficiency with which they can carry out tasks that were once the province of human beings. Language models can produce functional text for a wide range of contexts, while image generation models are giving us the capability to render into existence whatever image or video takes our fancy. This is widely taken as clear evidence of the benefits of AI. For Mumford, this type of thinking is precisely the problem. The myth of the machine is dehumanizing because it subordinates human values to machine values: speed and efficiency.

The most striking evidence of the myth’s cultural pervasiveness is that many avid accelerationists do not deny that AI could mean the end of humanity. They merely differ from the doomers in believing that this risk is necessary—even desirable—to achieve the spectacular increases in efficiency and productivity promised by AGI. Mumford foresaw this extreme endpoint. “The myth of the machine,” he wrote, “the basic religion of our present culture, has so captured the modern mind that no human sacrifice seems too great provided it is offered up to the insolent Marduks and Molochs of science and technology.”

Those branded as skeptics or doomers also still accept the premises of the myth of the machine. The stated aim of many organizations concerned with avoiding the worst AI outcomes is that we should “realize the benefits while mitigating the risks” of the technology. Mumford would argue the first half of this statement concedes too much, accepting the basic premise of the myth of the machine while presenting the task as removing the obstacles to realize its benefits. Many skeptics also share a basic misanthropic premise of machine superiority, focusing as they do on the biased, irrational, and flawed nature of human beings that needs machinic augmentation."

https://www.compactmag.com/article/ai-and-the-myth-of-the-machine/

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