🔗 The myth of technological inevitability - by Dave Karpf:

Consider what this implies for today’s “inevitable” digital future: Generative AI. It has become commonplace for tech evangelists to insist that, good or bad, these technologies have already arrived and we will just have to get used to them. Folks like Sam Altman repeatedly promise that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a near certainty — that we should root for OpenAI because if his company doesn’t build it, someone else will.

Perhaps we shouldn’t accept their insistence that AGI is inevitable. That is an aspirational claim, meant to shift the temporal register. Maybe we should demand that he explain and account for why this future he is trying to build is desirable.

The inevitability myth is an essential part of the political project of Silicon Valley.