Artificial Intelligence: The Class Struggle's Next Frontier

The history of artificial intelligence is a history of boring conferences. The term itself was first coined at a boring conference, one that took place in the summer of 1965 at Dartmouth College. One could chart a number of pre-histories when it comes to anxieties around smart, responsive machines and their effects on our world, but the real hype has always been underlaid by the bureaucratic haze of lanyards, plenaries, and good timekeeping. The hype waned during the 1970s, a time sometimes known as the'AI Winter', before being inflated again with the injection of private capital by those interested in the labour-saving potentials of the technology. The ever-looming'Jobpocolypse' brought about by AI quickly became a pressing concern for AI ethicists and policy wonks of all stripes.