Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than the technology of the future.
Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans off the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From professors to billionaires, from artists to fraudsters, from journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination.
Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.
Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fears about AI reflect different economic realities—from venture capitalists, to engineers, to artists, to warehouse workers. Truly understanding the potential impacts of AI means confronting capitalism and class, power and exploitation, in concrete terms. Only then can we fight the real threats to our lives, livelihoods, and the planet, instead of tilting at nightmare windmills.
Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of capitalism and its violent ways of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of insecure gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalists may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one in which our labor, knowledge, and technologies serve the people rather than capital.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Author: Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335174
Published: March 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 5.5 in X 8.5 in
Page count: 208
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence / Capitalism / Surveillance
About THE AUTHOR
Hagen Blix is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy.
Ingeborg Glimmer is a tech worker and industry researcher in Germany working on machine learning.
PRAISE
“In this highly thoughtful book, Blix and Glimmer delve deeply into the histories of AI, capitalism and neoliberal bureaucracy. The result is disturbing and unsettling, a provocative launchpad for resisting the apparent truths of AI that businesses and governments are so keen to impose on us.” —Nick Couldry, coauthor of Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back
Excerpt
Are AIs soon going to be all-powerful? Is the Terminator here, is the Matrix coming? Should we be ready to nuke the data centers in humanity’s last stand against rogue AIs? Perhaps the questions are simply ludicrous to some, but to others they have real urgency. Certainly, the fears they raise resonate with many people. It is up to all of us what we make of this, to understand the power of such stories. We must come up with our own interpretations that make sense out of our own experiences of capitalism and the ways in which it shapes technology. If we let those who profit from the status quo tell us what the stories are about, and shape the narrative, we risk tilting at windmills or even strengthening the very powers that already exploit us, that already profit from oppression, and that have already set us on a path towards climate catastrophe. With or without AI, those powers are already spelling doom. If we’re concerned with the battle for the future, we must be ready to fight, not imaginary future AI overlords, but the capitalist structure that already produces the things we fear.
Why we fear AI
Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer
