Toolmen by Mandy Brown.
AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousness—a prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be, and no meaningful effort to coalesce around a set of practices, because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.
Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
Intelligence has never been an objective quality that can be ascertained the way we measure the (actually increasing) carbon in the atmosphere. It is a political device that preserves power and care for those deemed worthy of it, and which simultaneously withdraws such care from everyone else. Its latest incarnation, with that modifier artificial asserts its power through programs that wash accountability from the programmers: control, wealth, and power run up to founders and investors while harms run down to the rest of us with no possibility of redress. The ideology beneath AI is nothing more than white supremacy glammed up by a techbro aesthetic, white hoods swapped for tactical pants, the old racial slurs upgraded to anti-DEI rhetoric, the burning cross traded in for midnight reductions in force.
This has always been the intention of AI, and where its connection to the intelligence-rankers of years past is cruelly apparent: if those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity. I think of the engineers and designers who have spent decades honing their skills, deepening personal and public creative practices in service both to the users of the systems they built and to their own brilliant spirits, now being told to park themselves in front of a sycophantic oracle that can be appeased only through rote dictates, and which never tires of lying even as their own minds and muscles atrophy from disuse. What is being automated here: the work or the people?
Among the Shing are humans known as “toolmen.” As children, the toolmen were identified as having “subnormal minds” and brought to the city to be plugged in to the psychocomputers, raised to become servants to the Lords, as the Shing are known. Mute and compliant, they seem a mere extension of the machines they operate: flesh-and-blood computers completing tasks to fulfill their program, with no thought or belief or desire to get in the way. A toolman is the perfect slave: he has no self to rail against his enslavement.