The New Artificial Intelligentsia

Writing for a series on the legacies of eugenics, Benjamin examines the beliefs of the tech leaders and thinkers driving artificial intelligence. She argues that both their hype and their warnings of doom serve to concentrate power, that their focus on ranked intelligence and far-future people echoes earlier eugenic thinking, and that the costs fall on workers and communities today. She ends by insisting that people still have a choice about the future.

• Warnings that AI could end humanity often come from the same people racing to build it.
• Claims that new technology is inevitable discourage people from questioning or refusing it.
• Michigan's automated fraud system wrongly accused tens of thousands of residents, showing real harms.
• Treating IQ and measured intelligence as supreme revives a core idea of early eugenics.
• Longtermist thinking can rank imagined future beings above people suffering now.
• Mining, data centers, and hidden labor in poorer regions carry the costs of the AI boom.

Benjamin mixes scholarly argument with personal anecdote, pointed wordplay, and moral urgency. Retyping her teaches how to build a critique through accumulated examples and quotation, and how coined terms and ironic phrasing can sharpen an argument.

These excerpts are short quotations for practice and commentary. All rights stay with the author; read the whole essay at the original source.