What it is to be human

Emily Bender: “[Satya Nadella]’s argument is not only specious, but also rests on minimizing what it is to be human, have ideas, learn, interact and communicate, so that he can say that the theft by companies of creative works to train their models is simply analogous to the experience of creative works by people.” This is a very important tactic to take note of in the discussion about so-called AI: the move to elevate the “intelligence” of machines serves simultaneously to denigrate the wholeness, creativity, and wisdom of living, embodied human beings. It thus fits in with long-running projects to demean the work of some people—women, people of color, those erroneously labeled as “unskilled”—in order to justify the obvious inequality on display. Stories of “virtual employees” and comparisons of machines to people need to be thoroughly rejected if we, the people, are to have any hope of doing good work ourselves.