“The market forces us to do this” – we’ve heard this excuse for decades whenever responsibility needed to be shirked. Now it sounds almost identical: “AI forces us to do this.” We’ve simply replaced “market” with “AI.” In December 2024, I spoke with Nina Benoit on The AI Sustainability Podcast about this parallel – and why we shouldn’t accept the same excuse twice.
My core arguments:
- AI repeats a failed promise: Liberalized markets promised freedom, justice, and prosperity. What we got: economic growth, but no sustainable development. AI now makes the same promises – once again pushing sustainability concerns into the background.
- Automation invites blind trust: We tend to treat algorithmic decisions as neutral, objective, and efficient. Structurally, however, AI systems are conservative: they preserve existing patterns rather than questioning them.
- AI doesn’t fix injustice – it perpetuates it: Machine learning systems learn from data, and data comes from the past. When the past was biased or unjust, AI perpetuates these injustices. Selling this as “innovation” is misleading.
- “Democratization” is the wrong word: When tech companies talk about “democratizing AI”, they mean: we want more users for our product. That’s not democracy, it’s customer acquisition – built on the foundation of generative AI models based on stolen creative work.
- A reverse Robin Hood effect: Stealing from artists and authors to enrich a handful of corporations. Democracy means self-governance and participation. That’s pretty much the opposite of how generative AI is currently built and governed.
- AI needs normalization, not special status: AI should be treated like any other powerful product: transparency requirements, safety standards, accountability, regulation. We don’t need special rules for AI. If a technology can’t meet basic safety and transparency standards, it shouldn’t be deployed at scale. It’s that simple.
In conversation
Why do we accept the excuse “AI forces us to do this” after “the market forces us to do this” has eroded responsibility for decades?
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