This note introduces our Fall 2024 issue.
We go to press just days before the U.S. presidential election. No matter who wins, the staggering problems with American democracy—the concentration of wealth, the power of large corporations, enormous economic inequality—will remain a challenge. Pervading every aspect of American life, they stand only to be amplified by the focus of this issue: the explosive release of generative AI.
Many outright reject this technology, fearing that it can only “perpetuate bias, exacerbate wealth inequality, and obscure accountability,” Evgeny Morozov observes in the lead essay in our forum. (As we write, news broke that the Pentagon purchased access to tools made by OpenAI—founded on the promise to build AI “for the benefit of humanity”—for combat missions in Africa.) Others accept it is here to stay and hope that “guardrails” will prevent the worst abuses.
Morozov rejects both these views. Tracing AI’s early development during the Cold War, he argues that the dehumanizing “efficiency” of today’s AI wasn’t inevitable. On the contrary, a “more democratic, public-spirited, and less militaristic technological agenda might have emerged” under different circumstances. This not an idle hypothetical; it offers “a meaningful horizon against which to measure the promises and dangers of today’s developments.” But realizing this more humane vision, Morozov concludes, will require a “radical political project.”
Respondents—from music legend Brian Eno to AI pioneer Terry Winograd—diverge on the most “difficult” question, as Winograd puts it: what the political path forward should look like. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs, looks to India, Taiwan, and Japan for models. Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak find inspiration in the “critical currents” ousted from Silicon Valley. All agree, however, that we can build the AI we want.
This democratic optimism runs through the issue, even in the face of punishing algorithms (Lily Hu), the indiscriminate violence of AI weaponry (Sophia Goodfriend), and high-stakes copyright wars (Alexander Hartley). Writing on health surveillance apps he once used, Omer Rosen tells us we should just walk away—and we can.
Finally, reporting from Beirut after Israel’s pager attack and bombings in late September, Joelle Abi-Rached describes the terror of being experimented upon with new high-tech weapons. She reads Martin Buber, C. P. Cavafy, and Elias Khoury. With fascism on the rise globally, their legacies of universalism are a good place to start in imagining AI futures.
