I was talking to my sister earlier today about how so much of the United States’ GDP growth is just based on AI advancements right now, and how we’ve got practically nothing else going for us.
She asked me why I’m so racist against AIs.
This did not come out of nowhere. I refer to them all the time as “fucking clankers” that are stealing all the jobs. How each data center uses about a million gallons of water a day just to draw pretty pictures and answer questions sometimes incorrectly.
So, is it possible to be racist against a machine?
Ok slightly longer actual answer. IMO the idea that you can be racist about AI is itself a offensive racist suggestion. By making that suggestion you are inherently comparing black people (and other people of disadvantaged ethnic groups) to inanimate objects (yes AI are inanimate objects no matter how many matrix multiplies they can do per second). That’s about the most hateful offensive thing you can do.
Racism is showing prejudice, antagonism, or discrimination against a person based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group.
A machine isn’t a person, and has no race or ethnicity, so no, you can’t be racist against a machine.
I don’t think there is an existing term for a bias against machines. The closest would probably be “Luddite”, but that generally means resisting new technology or even new ways of doing things in general, rather than having a bias against technology as a whole (or AI in particular).
I’ve seen “cyberphobia” and “robophobia” being suggested as terms to describe the behavior in fiction. I’d propose the term “organic supremacist” as my own suggestion for someone who feels any artificial attempt to perform the work of humans as being inherently inferior.
Eventually, if AI progresses far enough, the machines will be persons. There is, of course, considerable debate about where that point is, but it’s somewhere. And when it comes, not everyone will agree that it has come.
I would also remind those assembled that a lot of real-world racists have, historically, maintained that the groups against which they were biased were likewise “not persons”.
And this is why the suggestion is so offensive. By saying disliking AI is racist you are saying people of different races are analogous to boxes of silicon wafers
That is a valid point, and there may be a level of technology where it seems appropriate to grant personhood on AI. Which raises all kinds of ethical and legal questions (which countless scifi stories have explored).
At that point, if they identify as a race and/or ethnicity, racism might apply.
You could even have Motorolans and Intelese racial spats between AI.
You can’t be racist against a machine or something inanimate. You can be irrational or unreasonable about it, though. Like saying something human-made is automatically better than something AI-made, with no good argument.
Or to put it another way, we are a long way from AI even being even considered ethically comparable to animals. Animals should definitely be protected from harm, and given ethical protections by society, none of which should be given to AI.
But it’s still super offensive to say someone who doesn’t like dogs is being “racist” to dogs. How much more offensive is it to say someone who doesn’t like AI is being “racist” to AI?
When the New York Times published a speculative front page imagining their January 1, 2100 edition, one of the articles contained repeated references to “r’bots” - the implication being that “robot” had become an offensive slur.
Racism is a specific narrowly defined flavor of “us good; them bad”.
A person prejudiced against machine intelligence can certainly believe “us (humans) good; them (machines) bad.” It’s an “us-ism”, but it isn’t racism. Because machines are not a different ethnic group of humans. Now whether all possible us-isms are wrong, or only those that choose to subdivide humans by ethnicity, is a different and larger question.
I could see the OP’s sister using “racism” as a lazy shortcut for “us good; them bad”-ism. But she’d be ignorant, intellectually lazy, and linguistically wrong in so doing.
Even saying “We aren’t there yet” implies that it’s only a matter of time, which is hardly a sure thing.
My first reaction to the OP was "It sounds like your sister is confusingt LLMs like ChatGPT with “artificially intelligent” characters from science fiction like Data from Star Trek.
I admit that barring a collapse of civilization, my opinion is that it is more likely than not, and probably by quite a bit. We know it’s possible, since we exist. It’s just a matter of overcoming the technical obstacles and avoiding a collapse of our civilization before we get there.
I think the best example might be people calling Asimov’s robots (which are effectively human by the Caves of Steel if not earlier) “boy”. Which sounds very weird these days 70 years later where even using the term against a robot sounds vaguely racist, at least in the US.
