The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. The term "artificial intelligence" is widely recognized by researchers as less a technically precise descriptor than an aspirational project that comprises a growing collection of data-centric technologies. The recent AI trend kicked off around 2010, when a combination of increased computing power and massive troves of web data reanimated interest in decades-old techniques. It wasn't the algorithms that were new as much as the concentrated resources and the surveillance business models capable of collecting, storing, and processing previously unfathomable amounts of data. In other words, so-called "advances" in AI celebrated over the last decade are primarily the product of significantly concentrated data and computing resources that reside in the hands of a few large tech corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.