AI is myriad technologies that mutate and evolve, yet both the academic field devoted to its study and the industry that aims to realize it in its multiplicity are often said to have the nebulous aim of making machines capable of reproducing human-level, intelligent activity in most domains. The history of AI is narrated as a sequence of alternating “springtimes” and “winters,” in which progress is supposedly made toward this vague goal, only to falter. In 2022, the year large language models (LLMs) seized the world’s attention, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT became for many identical to all AI, a massive springtime bloomed, with a cohort of companies securing unprecedented funding while their leaderships argued human-level general machine intelligence, AGI, was just around the corner. This familiar narrative, which has continued to be woven by representatives of Big AI, serves to obscure how, in competing to build ever-larger LLMs, AI companies became responsible for grave social injustices as well as for enormous environmental damage. Members of a high-profile group of philosophers, “effective altruists focused on the long-term future” or longtermists, aid the obfuscation by echoing the idea that AGI is likely close and arguing that trying to realize it is, morally, the most important and perhaps also the most dangerous endeavor for all humankind. In boosting the hype around AGI, longtermists became complicit in serious harms. Scrutinizing this tradition is a route to understanding what is being done to the world in AGI’s name as well as to figuring out how to philosophize, not in collusion, but in resistance.
Alice Crary is an American moral and social philosopher who is currently the Walter A. Eberstadt Distinguished University Professor at the New School for Social Research and Visiting Fellow at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. She received her AB in Philosophy at Harvard and completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She was hired in the Philosophy Department at the New School’s Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (now the New School for Social Research), a few months after finishing her PhD, in 2000, and she has spent most of her career there, while also briefly holding a chair in philosophy at Oxford, as well as visiting positions in philosophy at Humboldt University, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Paris-1 Pantheon Sorbonne. She has published widely on meta-ethics, normative ethics, and social philosophy. Her current work focuses ties between human and animal justice. She is also working on the philosophical tradition of longtermism and questions about big AI and techno-fascism.
