No, AI is not for social good

Faced with the public furor over problems with artificial intelligence, tech companies and researchers would now have us believe that the big fix for those problems is to develop AI for social good. This proposal is not new; it's the latest in a long line of bold, mostly overreaching claims about technology's capability to do social good. In his 2012 book The Master Switch, Tim Wu makes the case that, in the beginning, television was supposed to change the world by making information freely available. In the '90s, tele-centers were supposed to transform education in developing countries. During the Arab Spring, we heard that social media was the loudspeaker of democracy.