It may seem improbable at first glance to think that there might be connections between the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and white supremacy. Yet the more you examine the question the clearer and the disturbing the links get.
Inspired in part by some recent work mentioned below, conversations with Chris Gilliard, a Twitter thread by Scoobyliu, ongoing work by Dale Carrico, and some other recent research mentioned below, I decided to try to see where the threads might lead. The more you examine the question the clearer and more disturbing the links get.
This is a brief think piece intended to stimulate additional reflections. It is not meant as a personal indictment of those who pursue AGI (although it is not meant to exonerate them either), but instead a structural analysis that starts from an acknowledgment of the ways that race and whiteness work in our society, and how they connect to other phenomena that may seem distant from them. In the case of AGI, there is an odd persistence of discourse that seems far in excess of what science allows, and those most captivated by that excess are often the same people captivated by excesses about race. Part of this is visible through the unusual amount of overlap between AGI promoters and those who believe in a strong correlation between what they call “race” and what they call “IQ.” I suspect it would be possible to read through a lot of the media and texts about AGI and find many marks of a commitment to white supremacy that promoters do not recognize in themselves.,,,
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