In her 2019 talk at NeurIPS, during the Queer in AI workshop, Ria Kalluri, an AI researcher at Stanford, proposed an incisive alternative to the question of how to ensure AI does “good.” Goodness, benefit to humanity—these terms will always be in the eye of the beholder. Rather, we should ask how AI shifts power: Does it consolidate or redistribute that power? To put it in the frame of this book, does it continue to fortify the empire, or does it begin to wrest us back toward democracy?
