Boston Review Magazine Redesigning AI Back Issue

Artificial intelligence will not create superintelligence anytime soon. But it is already making huge advances—revolutionizing medicine and transport, transforming jobs and markets, and reshaping the fabric of social life. At the same time, the promises of AI have been increasingly overshadowed by its perils, from automation and disinformation to powerful new forms of bias and surveillance. Reckoning with these threats to work, democracy, and justice, Redesigning AI asks what can be done to redirect AI for the good of everyone.

Leading off a forum, economist and best-selling author Daron Acemoglu argues that though the challenges are dire, the future is not inevitable. Just as technological development promoted broadly shared gains in the three decades following World War II, so AI can create inclusive prosperity and bolster democratic freedoms. Setting it to that task won’t be easy, but it can be achieved through government policy and regulation, the redirection of industry norms, and robust democratic oversight.

Respondents debate the precise role new technology plays in economic inequality, the wide range of algorithmic harms facing workers and citizens, and other concrete steps that can be taken to ensure a just future for AI. Other contributors explore the impact of new technology in domains from medicine to carework, the nature of skills training in a rapidly changing economy, and the ethical case for not building certain forms of AI in the first place. Together they sketch an urgent vision for redirecting the course of technological change for good.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Daron Acemoglu, Rediet Abebe, Aaron Benanav, Erik Brynjolfsson, Kate Crawford, Andrea Dehlendorf, Ryan Gerety, Anna Romina Guevarra, William S. Isaac, Maximilian Kasy, Molly Kinder, Nichola Lowe, Shakir Mohamed, Lama Nachman, Marie-Therese Png, Rob Reich, Daniel Susskind, Kenneth Taylor, Rachel Thomas, Annette Zimmermann