Best Of Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna's "The AI Con"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. On the history of eugenics in Silicon Valley and its connections to AI While many think of eugenics as a terrible part of history, Silicon Valley has deep and enduring connections to eugenicist thought. Stanford University's first president, David Jordan Starr, was a strident eugenicist who recruited eugenicist thinkers to major professorships within the university, among them Lewis Terman. Terman, the codifier of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, adapted Binet's original cognitive test in order to promote racial hierarchies that put white people at the top. Today, the kingmakers in the Valley have sometimes exuberantly, sometimes quietly, endorsed and financially supported eugenicist thinkers and alt-right politicians. These are the same few who have the power to make or break newcomers in the crowded artificial intelligence marke...
