There's this inevitability narrative that we hear from the tech companies all the time, and that is a bid to steal our agency.

And so, you know, Alex said it can be inspiring to take a principal's stand.

And one part of that is to say, no, I don't believe you.

If you say, well, this is here, we have to learn to live with it.

No.

Right? inevitable either in the development of something called AI or AGI or in the sort of continued

presence of this tech in our lives.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have two fantastic guests joining me on the show.

Alex Hanna is director of research at the Distributed AI Institute, and Emily M. Bender is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington.

They have a new book out called The AI Khan, How to Fight Big Text Hype and Create the Future

We Want. It sounds like exactly the type of thing that we like to talk about on this show.

Alex and Emily have been on the show in the past, of course. You know, Alex for the series

that we did called Data Vampires, looking at Data Centers and things like that, and Emily, too, talked to us about AI, and her input on that as a

computational linguist. Their new book is a great primer for people who are looking to understand

what is actually going on with the AI hype that we've been seeing over the past few years,

all of the problems with it, and what the

actual goals of these people are. And importantly, they also look at how we can push back against

these things, right? Both as individuals, but also in collective ways through government and

through other means. And I wanted to make that a big part of our discussion, but we started off by

talking about, you know, some of the bigger ideas of the book around AI hype, but also a number of the things that we

have been seeing occurring at the moment that I wanted to get their input on as people who have

been paying such close attention to everything going on with AI, not just for the past

...