Why men shouldn’t control artificial intelligence

We assume that technology must have begun with a weapon (and that the first inventor must have been a man). But as the science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin pointed out, “the spear” was probably not the original technology. Archaeologists and anthropologists now increasingly believe that sharpened sticks were invented by women to gather foods, and were adapted for hunting only later. If the first tools weren’t hunting tools it isn’t clear that technology must always seek to crush, dominate and exploit. Female science-fiction authors have often been criticised for not writing “hard” science fiction precisely because they have defined technology in this more neutral sense. As Le Guin put it: “Technology is just the active human interface with the material world.” There is nothing inherently violent about it. Unless we want it to be. But the patriarchal imagination doesn’t seem to think it will be up to us to decide this.

There are many justifiable concerns around artificial intelligence, but to say it’s all gloom and doom is a severe failure of imagination.

I also loved this closing paragraph:

We talk as if the machines were the active participants in history, and humanity the passive ones. We dance around the machines as if they were deities. Forgetting that we have created them with our own hands. Fed them with data from our own minds. It is a narrative that leaves us both powerless and without responsibility. Owned by our own creations.