Why AI? To Replace Women
It’s been a commonplace for years now to point out that tech bros and their tech companies have a serious consent problem. They’ll ask you to agree to web page notifications (which nobody ever wanted) and offer you just the two options “Yes” and “Ask me again later” — they literally won’t take “No” for an answer. Dark patterns like this — a structural contempt for your consent — are all over the internet that tech built.
Meanwhile, a lot of us have been wondering about the absolute wild frenzy of the billionaire techbros to deploy AI at scale in every software product and corporate service. It may not be strictly true that “nobody” wants their AI products, but if you don’t want them, nobody in the AI industry is willing to hear your objections. Your consent, or lack of it, is no concern of theirs. They are not listening.
What’s at the psychological heart of all that? Huge buckets of money, sure. But it feels like more. Presently they’re burning money at an unprecedented rate. And yeah, partly they hope to make it back when their AI goldrush claims prove out. But there’s more. This feels emotional. This feels ideological. The Epstein class is invested in ramming (and I chose this metaphor with both care and malice) AI down everyone’s throat. Why?
Here’s a video clip of V. Spehar at Under The Desk News offering what may be a partial answer. The clip’s a bit awkward, because she’s verbally describing what someone else said, and then she follows it up by describing a social media thread with some similar ideas from a different person. The transcript excerpts, I think, are easier to follow, but maybe that’s just me:
I asked Ashley St. Clair “Is AI inevitable? Where did this come from?”
She said no, AI is because capitalismers have reached a point where these dudes understand that they’ve extracted the most labor that they possibly can from a working proletariat. And so they’re like, well, if you won’t allow us to do slavery again, then we’ll just build AI to replace you and replace you in terms of labor, in terms of intelligence, in terms of creating culture, in terms of sex. She’s like, this all comes back to sex robots.
This all comes back to the idea of diminishing women’s place. It’s not just the AI that we see. The AI slop and the like, you know, summaries of stuff and all this business. She’s like, it’s using AI to create anatomical wombs so that they wouldn’t need women to incubate children.
V. then goes on to make the consent point more explicitly:
Francesca Ramsey had a good point on Threads the other day. She’s like, the way that the tech bros talk about AI is almost the way that rapists talk about rape. “Well, you can’t stop it. Well, it’s gonna happen to you. Well, you might as well not resist it. Well, it won’t be as bad if you don’t resist.”
She’s like, you need to hear the meaning behind the ways that they’re saying that this is inevitable, that you have no choice, no autonomy, no ability to say no. We absolutely have the right to say no and a duty to say no.
Is any of this correct? I’m way too distant from the corridors of techbro power to say for sure. But it has the ring of truth to it. It feels just the same as when they won’t let us say “NO” to their fucking cookies and web page notifications. It explains the seeming contempt and disdain for user preferences that make the AI buildout different from tech bubbles we have seen before. The bros aren’t chasing a market full of users who want their product; they are building (under this theory) a world with more slaves in it, and they are absolutely foaming for that outcome.
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