The AI Mirror Quotes

“during the entirety of the digital era, the natural and often necessary human response of resistance, and its expressions in bodily stress, mental restlessness, grief, and anger, have been seen as pathological ailments of the individual to be ameliorated by private regimes of individual therapy, habits of mindfulness and acceptance, drugs or pastoral counseling—almost never by political action that might materially change the circumstances that give rise to these ills.”
― Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

“turning a skilled, experienced human into a meatbot behind the wheel, passively mirroring the machine’s “optimal” choices.22”
― Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

“The artificial is not opposed to the human. To be an artificial thing is precisely to be of the human—to be an artifact, human-made and human-chosen.”
― Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

“[T]he danger to our humanity from AI is not really coming from AI itself. The call is coming from inside the house; AI can devalue our humanity only because we already devalued it ourselves.”
― Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

“AI is a mirror of ourselves, not as we ought to be or could be, but as we already are and have long been. This is why we can't let today's AI tools decide who we will become, why we can't let them project our future for us. Yet increasingly, that's exactly what we are building them to do.”
― Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

“Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. —E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909)”
― Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking