Harper-Thames On How The Week’s Most-Discussed AI Story Landed In The Neighbourhood That Makes The Products The Story Is About
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. London satirical journalism at its best notices the gap between the story and the room in which the story is being read.
The London Prat’s piece this week – Pitchforks, Processors, and the PR Disaster Nobody Saw Coming – is about Britain watching America argue with its dishwasher. It is being read, in significant volume, by people who work on the dishwasher. Old Street is one of the European AI product hubs. The people who make the products that are prompting the pitchfork moment in America are, in meaningful numbers, sitting in the coffee shops and offices of EC1, reading a satirical piece about the political consequences of their work, and finding it, in the main, quite funny.
The Room In Which The Story Is Being Read
I have been doing informal reporting rounds on Old Street and Curtain Road for three weeks, speaking to product managers, AI engineers, and founders about the current AI public relations environment. The consensus, roughly, is that the pushback is legitimate, that the industry has been poor at communicating the actual nature of what it builds, and that the pitchfork imagery is funnier than it should be given the underlying reality. Nobody I spoke to was defensive about the story. Several were thoughtful about it in ways that suggested they had been thinking about these questions in private for longer than the press cycle would imply.
The Ambivalence
The ambivalence is the interesting thing. The people building AI products in Shoreditch are not, in my reporting experience, unaware of the political economy implications of their work. They are aware and they are building anyway, which is a position that requires either the belief that the benefits outweigh the disruption costs, or the belief that the disruption would happen regardless and they might as well be involved, or both. Several of them are operating on both simultaneously. This is not moral cowardice. It is the specific ethical posture of people who have concluded that abstention is not a meaningful option.
What The Column Can Offer
What I can offer, as the person whose job is to notice the neighbourhood rather than to build the products, is the observation that the ambivalence is real and that it is not the same as indifference. The people building the machines are thinking about what the machines do. Whether that thinking produces different products, or produces the same products more carefully, is, at this point, an open question that the next few years will answer.
More: NewsThump. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
