to be falling apart during the pandemic. I am also grateful to a group of women who are a constant inspiration to me, for their activism, strength and integrity: Vicky Mayer, Alana Mann, Priscilla Karant, Terry Woronov, Lyn Hsieh, Sarah Gong, Lucia Sorbera, Laura Forlano, Melinda Rankin and Felicity Ruby. I am grateful for the feedback I received from Graham Murdock, and our constant exchanges – Graham is the best mentor in the world. I’m also grateful to Frank Pasquale for our numerous conversations on AI, public interest and our beloved political economy. My unbounded thanks to Mary Savigar at Polity Press for believing in this project since its start and whose thoughtful comments helped bring the manuscript to life. Finally, a special thank you to my family, for the love I always received and for giving me the strength, values and determination to always fight for a more just world.
Introduction
Imagine sitting at your desk during one of those long COVID-19 lockdowns and remotely controlling a cartoon-like character that has your features. You’ve given her your name and move her through the big Piazza del Duomo in Milan – yes, just beside la Galleria – so she can buy that cool dress for you by Dolce & Gabbana that you’ve been dreaming about for ages.
This isn’t a video game. It’s your cheaply rented humanoid robot shopping for you, trying on clothes for you, giving you the best advice on colour combinations on the basis of your thousands of previous Google searches, then even mailing your purchase to your home address. And next, you send your robot-you to visit your mum, to keep her company until you have time to call her for a live video stream conversation. Meanwhile your robot-you sends your mum your favourite poetry, which your robot knows better than you do, thanks to the algorithm that revisits your YouTube and Netflix feeds.
We often think of artificial intelligence (AI) as a thing of the immediate future. This is hardly surprising, because we are constantly bombarded by slogans of AI coming to change our life, whether we like it or not. We are reassured it will be a better life. A better capitalism. A better environment. But AI is already here, and perhaps many of you didn’t even notice – since many AI applications are already so embedded in our everyday life they no longer capture our attention.
Think of the AI-enabled camera that helps control traffic at the next intersection you cross. Or the facial recognition scan that you are forced to go through when you are at the stadium entrance. Think of all the latest smart phone applications, all running a variety of AI programs, when you are recommended music videos on YouTube, or when the Facebook app on your mobile scans your newsfeed in search of fake news, until you go home to your Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
But there is much more. AI technologies are translating languages, advising corporations on investments, flying drones, diagnosing diseases, protecting borders.
Fancy a social bot to overcome loneliness? Microsoft’s Xiaoice (pronounced Shou-ice) chatbot recently became a global phenomenon with over 660 million international users and a reach of over 450 million smart devices (Zhang 2020). Xiaoice, which means ‘Little Bing’ in Chinese, was launched in 2014 by a small team of researchers and has since gained notoriety as a ‘virtual girlfriend’ across China, Japan and Indonesia. Presented as a teenage girl, Xiaoice is built on an empathetic computing framework that enables machine recognition of feelings and states, allowing dynamic responses; and this results in an AI companion with high emotional intelligence, which encourages long-term connections with its users.
‘If we lose our environment, we lose our planet and our lives. We must understand and debate the environmental costs of AI.’
There is also a significant amount of research connecting AI systems to applications in medicine. An international study examining the potential use of AI in the field of dermatology has found improved diagnostic accuracy and clinical decision-making when AI is used in conjunction with human clinical checks, suggesting stronger results than the use of AI or experts alone (Tschandl et al. 2020). The artificial neural networks analyse uploaded pictures and identify potential sites of malignant melanoma; this is currently being tested in an Australian skin clinic. The program has since been able to recognize melanoma at sizes smaller than the human eye can detect, for instance melanomas as small as 0.2 millimetres (UQ News 2020).
This is without mentioning AI’s current applications in the global conservation field – from modelling biodiversity loss to monitoring migratory species and climate change scenarios. AI’s emerging use in agriculture has aimed to optimize everything from crop production to resource consumption, harvesting, monitoring and processing. In 2019, twenty-five European countries signed a declaration of cooperation for the digitalization of agriculture, in an acknowledgement of the potential power of digital technologies and with the goal to establish infrastructure designed to support a smart agri-food sector (European Commission 2020a). Projects funded by the European Union (see Brevini and Murdock 2017) include Sweeper, a sweet pepper-harvesting robot that uses algorithms for fruit detection and localization and that was the first of its kind to demonstrate harvest success in a commercial greenhouse (Arad et al. 2020).
Or take CORaiL, an AI-powered solution to monitor and analyse coral reef resilience. Since May 2019, it has been deployed in the reef surrounding Pangatalan Island in the Philippines and has helped researchers to study the effects of climate change in the area (Wu 2020). Another famous robot wandering around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is called LarvalBot and designed to carry coral larvae across destroyed areas of the reef. The larvae are distributed so that new coral colonies can form and new coral communities can develop. This process mitigates the damage caused by mass bleaching, weather events and climate change (Cimons 2019).
Some of these AI technologies are simply processing the data according to a basic set of formulae. Others are more complex systems that are effectively able to teach themselves progressively and learn from data as they are collected.
Despite the different complexities and endless applications, the dominant rhetoric around AI extends far past its current capabilities. Accounts across countries throughout the world proclaim the imminent development of intelligent machines, capable of outsmarting the human mind, amid promises to change everything fundamentally, from our working lives and domestic habits to transport and health services – to name just a few areas that will be affected. In the last decade we have witnessed a clear increase in predictions that the arrival of superintelligence is imminent; thus nations are expressing an urgent need to be ready for AI. As Goode writes, this is leading to the ‘sublime spectacle of inevitability … that does little to offer lay citizens the sense that they can be actively involved in shaping its future’ (Goode 2018: p. 204).
AI is thus being promoted as the principal solution for many of humanity’s challenges; it is put forward as inevitable and ineluctable (Brevini in press). The following statement, taken from the official communications of the European Union, could not be clearer: ‘AI is helping us to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges: from treating chronic diseases or reducing fatality rates in traffic accidents to fighting climate change or anticipating cybersecurity threats’ (European Commission 2018b).
The High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) appointed by the European Commission goes into even greater detail about the capabilities of AI to make humanity ‘flourish’ by solving virtually all problems of society:
We believe that AI has the potential to significantly transform society. AI is not an end in itself, but rather a promising means to increase human flourishing, thereby enhancing individual and societal well-being and the common good, as well as bringing progress and innovation. In particular, AI systems can help to facilitate the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, such as promoting gender balance and tackling climate change, rationalising our use of natural resources, enhancing our health, mobility and production processes, and supporting how we monitor progress against sustainability and social cohesion indicators. (European Commission 2019a)
