The students boo artificial intelligence Newcomers across the country don’t just care about jobs. They learned an urgent lesson from the not-so-distant past.
They know that the familiar promise of empowerment and creativity will continue to give way to the pathologies of the online surveillance economy: viral garbage, commercial manipulation, and addictive apps – this time on automated steroids.
The utopian promise of the tech industry is on life support. Hopes that it would empower workers and revitalize democracy have deteriorated between the massive data breach of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the rapid adoption of the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe the online economy.
If Silicon Valley once received the enthusiastic welcome reserved for “good capitalists,” those days are over, and rightly so.
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The backlash is not limited to AI. The luster and hype surrounding the entire tech industry in the 1990s and 2000s, when Gen Xers and millennials were flocking to Silicon Valley, has fizzled, replaced by massive layoffs and a litany of social harms.
It’s not just that Generation Z has lost confidence in Big Tech. Faced with rampant economic inequality and the decline of democracy, many now view the titans of technology as the barons of late-stage capitalism, fueled by greed.
Generation Z has learned that what determines the future of technological innovations are not their inherent capabilities but the choices of the private organizations that deploy them. Students fear that AI will enhance data-driven consumer manipulation and flood the media environment with synthetic bait.
These young people are already seeing the effects of technology on their lives and education and don’t like the results. In my own institutionstudents formed a Luddite club to resist the siren song of social media, and they are not alone.
In our age of short attention spans, it is not easy to return to the heady days of the early web, when we were guaranteed that everyone would benefit from access to accumulated knowledge about the world and become an active participant in well-informed self-governance. The futurist George Gilder For example, it was predicted in the 1990s that the personal computer would become “a powerful force for democracy, individuality, community, and high culture.”
Today’s generation wasn’t here for all that, and now they’re faced with the reality that the tech industry has actually delivered – not the fantasy it’s sold. They are confronted with the fact that what matters is not only technology, but also the social relations in which it is embedded.
Instead of cultural uplift and the creation of an informed citizenry, young people see billionaires profiting from injecting the most sensational and polarizing viral content into our newsfeeds.
Instead of prosperity, they see real wages for American workers in decline and a country in which the richest 1 percent control more wealth than ever before. They watch as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sends his fiancée and a pop star into the stratosphere while Amazon workers pee in bottles And collect food stamps.
Instead of a vibrant, information-enhanced multicultural democracy, they see a country descending into authoritarianism and corruption on an unprecedented scale while platforms hire teams of psychologists to help them. young drug addicts to brain rot online.
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Faced with these developments, technological oligopolies remain in a sort of time lag. They look in the mirror and don’t see the caricature of extreme and inexplicable wealth that they have become; rather, they strive to recapture the image of themselves as young, hip founders in hoodies parading through the plush campuses of Silicon Valley while promoting happy-go-lucky “don’t be evil” capitalism.
The omnipresent venture capital Marc Andreessen sums up this midlife crisis. Former founder of the Netscape web browser, he recently deplored the end of the “deal” whereby tech moguls were revered by the media, rewarded with honorary degrees “from every university” and invited to “every big party.”
If tech billionaires are too confined in their fabulous wealth to absorb the lessons of history, that is not the case for this year’s students. They see a bigger picture: a world with powerful AI tools in the hands of a few companies dedicated to using our own data to control and manipulate us.
They see a present in which companies with unprecedented surveillance power kowtow to an increasingly authoritarian administration intent on targeting its perceived political enemies.
During his commencement speech at the University of Arizona, former Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google responded to graduating seniors’ AI skepticism by urging them to play a role in shaping the future of AI. It was apparently trying to revive the promise of an earlier digital age. Schmidt, 71, is old enough to remember when these claims were commonplace, while today’s students are not.
They quickly understood what previous generations were slow to admit: When billionaires commit to empowering the world, they usually only think about themselves.
Mark Andrejevic is a professor of media studies at Pomona College.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
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