Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares

Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than technology in the future.

Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans of the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From academics to billionaires, artists to fraudsters, journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination. Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.

Science and tech industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted, and arcane world of AI nightmares in order to demystify what people say about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble, and show how fears about AI reflect very different economic realities: from venture capitalists to AI engineers, from artists to warehouse workers at Amazon. If we want to understand the fears and potential impacts of AI, we must think about capitalism, the economy, and class power in real terms we can confront and wage our struggles on.

Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of the violence and alienation at the root of capitalism and its way of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalist may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one where our labor, knowledge, and technologies serves us, rather than us serving capital and its owners.

Hagen Blix is a cognitive scientist, whose research is at the intersection of language, cognition, and political economy. Hagen’s work is in linguistics, the applied side of which was in artificial intelligence and natural language processing models ( BERT, ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc).

They grew up in Germany and live in New York city with two cats and one other human.

Ingeborg Glimmer is an AI researcher who has published widely in the fields of natural language processing, neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics. They work on finding the best ways to train and evaluate large language models. When they’re not building AI, they are wondering what images of the future AI is conjuring for us about the world as it is today. Ingeborg Glimmer is a pen name.