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Emily Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program, affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, and affiliate faculty in the Information School. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She has been featured in articles for the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time. Whats the big idea? The AI Con is an exploration of the hype around artificial intelligence, whose interests it serves, and the harm being done under this umbrella. Society has options when it comes to pushing back against AI hype, so there is still hope that we can collectively resist and prevent tech companies from mortgaging humanitys future. Below, co-authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna share five key insights from their new book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Techs Hype and Create the Future We Want. Listen to the audio versionread by Emily and Alexin the Next Big Idea App. 1. The tech thats driving the current wave of AI hype is built on a parlor trick Chatbots like ChatGPT are impressive technology, but maybe not in the way you think. They cannot perform the range of functions they purportedly fulfill, but rather, they are designed to impress us. The key to their parlor trick lies in how people utilize language. You might think its a simple matter of decoding what the words say, but the process is both far more complex and far more social. We interpret language by relying on everything we know (or guess) about the person who said the words, and whatever common ground we share with them. Then we make inferences about what they must have been trying to convey. We do this instinctively and reflexively. So, when we encounter synthetic text of the kind that comes out of ChatGPT and its ilk, we interpret it by imagining a mind behind the text, even though there is no mind there. In other words, the linguistic and social skills we wrap around AI outputs are what make it so easy for the purveyors of chatbots to fool us into perceiving chatbots as reasoning entities. 2. AI is not going to take your job, but it will make your job a lot worse Much of the purpose of AI technology serves to remove humans from the equation at work. The story of the Writers Guild of America strike is instructive here. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America East and West (or the WGA), the labor union representing Hollywood writers, went on strike for several reasons, including a demand to raise the pay rate that writers receive from streaming services. They also wanted to ensure that they wouldnt be reduced to babysitters for chatbots tasked to write scripts based on harebrained ideas from movie and television producers. John Lopez, a member of the WGAs AI working group, noted that writers could be paid the rewrite rate for dealing with AI-generated content, which is much less than the pay rate for an original script. Weve seen the threat of image and text generators drastically reduce the number of job opportunities for graphic designers, video game artists, and journalists. This is not because these tools can adequately perform the tasks of these professionals, but they perform well enough for careers to be cut short and for workers to be rehired at a fraction of what they had been paid before, just so that they can fix the sloppy outputs of AI. They perform well enough for careers to be cut short and for workers to be rehired at a fraction of what they had been paid before. Furthermore, systems that get called AI are often a thin veneer that hides the tried-and-true corporate strategy of outsourcing labor to people in the Majority World, also called the Global South. Many of these workers moderate online content, test chatbots for toxic outputs, and even remotely drive vehicles that are advertised as being fully automated. Luckily, workers have been able to push back, both by concerned labor action, industrial sabotage (especially through creative tools for artists, like Nightshade and Glaze, which prevent their work from being used for training image generation models), and political education. 3. The purpose of the AI con is to disconnect people from social services Because we use language in just about every sphere of activity, and because the synthetic text extruding from machines can be trained to mimic language, it can seem like we are about to have technology that can provide medical diagnoses, personalized tutoring, wise decision making in the allocation of government services, legal representation, and moreall for just the cost of electricity (plus whatever the companies making the chatbots want to charge). But in all these cases, its not the words that matter, but the actual thought that goes into them and the relationships they help us build and maintain. AI systems are only good for those who want to redirect funding away from social services and justify austerity measures. Meanwhile, those in power will be sure to get services from actual people, while foisting the shoddy facsimiles off on everyone else. The head of Health AI at Google, Greg Corrado, said he wouldnt want Googles Med-PaLM system to be part of his familys health care journey. That didnt stop him from bragging about how it supposedly passed a medical licensing exam. It didnt. But more to the point, designing systems to pass multiple-choice exams about medical situations is not an effective way to build useful medical technology. In these domains, AI hype takes the form of specious claims of technological solutions to social problems, based, at best, on spurious and unfounded evaluations of the systems being sold. 4. AI is not going to kill us all, but climate change might There was a time in Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. when an idiosyncratic, yet serious, question was posed to people working on technology or tech policy: What is your p(doom)? p(doom) refers to probability of doom, or the likelihood that AI would somehow kill all of humanity. This doomerism is predicated on the development of artificial general intelligence (or AGI). AGI is poorly defined, but the basic idea is a system which can do a variety of tasks as well as or better than humans. Unfortunately, doomerism has serious purchase with some technologists and policymakers, and is predicated on a body of unseemly ideologies, including effective altruism, longtermism, and rationalism. These ideologies take the moral philosophy of utilitarianism to the extreme, suggesting that we need to discount harm in the present to save the billions of trillions of humans who will live in some undefined future. These ideologies are eugenicist in their origins and implications. Doomerism has serious purchase with some technologists and policymakers. eanwhile, we are likely to fail to meet the Paris Agreements goal to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and AI is making this problem worse. The data centers that host these tools are generating vast amounts of excess carbon, semiconductors used for their parts are leeching forever chemicals into the ground, and backup generators are projected to cause more respiratory illnesses in the poorest parts of the U.S. and elsewhere. Not only are robots not going to take over the world, but their production is going to make the climate crisis much worse. 5. None of this is inevitable The people selling AI systems and the hype around them would like us to voluntarily give up our agency in these matters. They tell us that AI, or even AGI, is inevitable, or at least that systems like ChatGPT are here to stay. But none of this is inevitable. We do have agency, both collectively and individually. Collectively, we can push for regulations that prevent AI tech from being used on us and for labor contracts that keep us in control of our work. On an individual level, we can refuse to use AI systems. We can be critical consumers of automation, being sure we understand whats being automated, how it was evaluated, and why its being automated. We can also be critical consumers of journalism about technology, looking for and supporting work that holds power to account. And finally, we can and should engage in ridicule as praxis, meaning having fun pointing out all the ways in which synthetic media extruding machines are janky and tacky. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
In my last Fast Company column, I shared my reasons for manufacturing my electric trucks in the U.S. Im not alone. While near-shoring to North America has been underway for several years, the current tariff shifts and shipping complexities make U.S. manufacturing a higher priority still. However, there were 292,825 factories in the U.S. as of 2021. Of those, 846 employ 1,000 people or more. Some of these are my engineering firms clients, giving us a front row seat to the complexity of retrofitting an existing factory to full U.S. manufacturing. While building a new factory is expensive and lengthy, these companies tasks are more difficult still. There are good reasons for making the shift as quickly as possible. Moving to most or fully U.S. manufacturing brings higher visibility, faster response time, and higher resilience to supply chain disruption, as well as greater protection from tariff shifts and geopolitical change. But if youre early in the process, heres my advice for your transition: Determine a priority ranking for the refining and raw materials you shift to in-country and North American sourcing. Give highest ranking to categories including defense, high value items (such as steel, aluminum, and rare minerals, etc.), and consumer safety items (such as pharmaceutical components, etc.). Be more strategic in the offshore suppliers you continue using for non-advanced manufacturing by prioritizing closer and more geographic-friendly locations for production and shipment such as Mexico and Argentina. Utilize government-backed capital, where possible, for extracting/mining minerals and metals such as lithium, red mud, magnesium, etc. Beyond the high-ranking product categories, move to domestic suppliers for primary materials such as steel, aluminum, cement, and plastics. Likewise, reduce offshoring of technical staff as well as raw materials, where possible. Use all means possible to become power independent through solar production, micro-grids, and nuclear power production. Consider creating a 4-year completion bonus for military vets. Hire vets wherever possible, as they make great workers and entrepreneurs. Likewise, we can press for future policy changes that best support Made in America manufacturing, as follows: Encourage ship building in the U.S., as well as creating new means of automated freight transit. Work towards transformation plans for government-funded R&D to include more attractive loans, rebates, and grants, as well as programs for tax-free status for intellectual property during commercialization, to incent and support organizations making the shift. Consider energy rebates to U.S. manufacturers and distributors to make American manufacturing more cost-effective and viable. Create policies to include the cost of offshore staff in tariff calculations. Expand trade relationships with Caribbean nations for products such as sugar, avocados, bananas, etc. Avoid or even ban foreign ownership of the food supply chain. Create fair competition for government contracting. Make health supplements and homeopathic medicines tax deductible, to promote a healthy workforce. While it may not be readily evident, these policy changes are related to successful reshoring. In all, we need larger scale, lower costs, and more automated and simplified mechanisms for product manufacturing. These issues, in my experience, are as equally important as the raw materials we require. We need increased support for niche manufacturing. In my opinion, we also need deregulation, and increased access to land (particularly in the west; the federal government owns great quantities of the available land, which is choking available supply). I believe we need better education, self-reliance, health, and incentive structures to get the capital, entrepreneurs, and workers for Made in America manufacturing. Whos with me? Matthew Chang is the founding partner of Chang Robotics.
Category:
E-Commerce
Layoff announcements from U.S. employers have increased 80% to 696,309 job cuts through May of this year, compared to the 385,859 cuts announced throughout the first five months of 2024, according to the latest layoffs report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Federal government agencies have been most impacted by planned job cuts in 2025, with 284,827 job reductions year to date, compared to 36,325 U.S. government job cuts announced during the same period last year. Retail is the second-leading industry in job cuts this year, with 75,802 cuts since the start of 2025. That’s a 274% increase in retail job reductions compared to the same period last year, when U.S. companies announced 20,276 layoffs. Why are companies laying off workers? According to the report, DOGE-related efforts remain the leading reason given for job cut announcements this year. This includes reductions in federal employee and contractor roles, and private nonprofit layoffs resulting from federal funding cuts. Market and economic conditions were the second-most cited explanation for announced U.S. layoffs, followed by store closings. In a news release discussing the layoff report, Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas said, “Tariffs, funding cuts, consumer spending, and overall economic pessimism are putting intense pressure on companies’ workforces. Companies are spending less, slowing hiring, and sending layoff notices.” Retail store closures are trending upward Store closings being among the top reasons cited for U.S. retail layoffs is unsurprising. Fast Company has written extensively about retail store closings throughout the U.S., from companies like Kohl’s, Macy’s, and JCPenney. While some retailers have chosen to shutter the doors of some locations, others have filed for bankruptcy protection and announced company-wide store closures. In January 2025, Joann Fabrics filed for bankruptcy for a second time. The fabric and crafts store previously filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2024. Similarly, Rite Aid publicized its decision to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 5. The retail pharmacy first filed for bankruptcy in October 2023. Hiring efforts are up slightly, yet remain sluggish As for hiring efforts, U.S. companies have announced 79,741 planned hires through May of this year, an increase of 57% from the same period last year. However, planned hiring announcements remain historically low compared to pre-pandemic and early-pandemic years.
Category:
E-Commerce
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