Machine learning is innately conservative and wants you to either act like everyone else, or never change

Next month, I’m giving a keynote talk at The Future of the Future: The Ethics and Implications of AI, an event at UC Irvine that features Bruce Sterling, Rose Eveleth, David Kaye, and many others!

Preparatory to that event, I wrote an op-ed for the LA Review of Books on AI and its intrinsic conservativism, building on Molly Sauter’s excellent 2017 piece for Real Life.

Sauter’s insight in that essay: machine learning is fundamentally conservative, and it hates change. If you start a text...