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wythran

wythran@bookrastinating.com

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Kate Crawford: Atlas of AI (2021) 5 stars

The hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and …

The master-slave metaphor is riddled throughout engineering and computation. One of the earliest uses of this racist metaphor dates back to 1904 describing astronomical clocks in a Cape Town observatory. But it wasn't until the 1960s that the master-slave terminology spread, particularly after it was used in computing, starting with the Dartmouth timesharing system...The problematic implication that control is equivalent to intelligence would continue to shape the AI field for decades. And as Ron Eglash has argued, the phrasing has a strong echo of the pre-Civil War discourse on runaway slaves.

Atlas of AI by 

A dive into computing etymology as part of a broader discussion on labour and automation.