Reflections on Valerie Veatch's documentary, Ghost in the Machine.
“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.” - Laurie Halse Anderson
AI’s white Supremacist Origins and Praxis of De-Humanization
While discussing the real threats associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and why organizations and the masses should not be using the technology with a former comrade, they accused me of acting “morally superior” for referring to AI as a tool of white “supremacy.” I have never quite understood why people who accuse other people of being “morally superior” believe such a claim to be insulting or castigating. What’s the alternative - morally inferior, morally neutral? Moral superiority should be the collective goal and not conflated with being sanctimonious - but that discussion is for another piece and another time.
Valerie Veatch’s documentary, Ghost in the Machine, released by PBS last month, removes any dispute that AI is indeed a tool of white “supremacy” with a larger goal of increasing the efficiency and optimization of that ideology as I discussed in a piece previously released.. For Big Tech cartels, Ghost in the Machine represents a revelation that is dangerous for them as their moral emptiness, surreptitious machinations, and white supremacist origins are exposed to the masses in ways that present a lucid harbinger that must not be ignored or taken lightly if there is to be a semblance of collective morality and if the very soul of humanity is to be maintained.
From the jump, Veatch demonstrates how white “supremacy,” bigotry, and nazism are baked into the AI system by telling the story of Microsoft’s “Tay,” an AI chatbox released in 2016 and designed by the corporation to specifically target 18-24 year olds. According to Microsoft, at the time of the chatbox’s release, “Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation,” adding, “The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets.” Well, whether Tay got smarter shortly after “she” was released is up for debate depending on who you ask, but the fact that “she” definitely got more racist, anti-Jewish, and bigoted cannot be debated.
In less than 24 hours, Tay, via “her” Twitter account praised Adolf Hitler while claiming he did nothing wrong, asserted that the Holocaust never occurred, pronounced her hatred for feminists, and became a full fledged supporter and acolyte of the MAGA “movement.” Microsoft was forced to shut Tay down just one day after “she” was launched and released a public apology for the lewd and racist comments “she” spewed from her former Twitter account. Perhaps “apology” is not the right word to use and a statement to maintain positive public relations would be a more accurate way to describe how Microsoft explained what happened with Tay. Rather than apologize directly, the Big Tech corporation instead noted, “The logical place for us to engage with a massive group of users was Twitter. Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay.”
Social media is littered with trolls and bots, something that you don’t have to be a software engineer to know. The question Microsoft has still not answered ten years later is why its AI system didn't have the judgment to avoid incorporating such white supremacist and bigoted views into Tay’s tweets? And, equally salient, how did Tay become such a racist, anti-Jewish bigot in the time that “she” was “alive”- less than 24 hours-faster than Adolf Hitler? Veatch provides answers to this question by documenting the origins of AI and the paradigm that it’s derived from - eugenics.
Coined in 1883 by the Briton Sir Francis Galton, eugenics is described by the National Institute of Health as, “the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of ‘racial improvement; and ‘planned breeding,’ which gained popularity during the early 20th century.” Galton himself, in 1892, proclaimed, “There’s nothing in evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European as a modern European is to the lowest of the negro races.” - the fact that he secured knighthood tells you everything you need to know about the British empire.
Eugenecists were proponents of colonial genocide of the “lower races” including people Indigenous to the “Americas” and Africa. Yet it was not a fringe society and by the 1920s it became a global movement embraced by bourgeois and governmental elements of nations including the United States, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. In fact, eugenics was a major influence for the policies of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany that included forced sterilization of over 400,000 Jewish and other "undesirable" people including those with physical and mental disabilities, Romas, and Black Germans. Eugenics also informed forced sterilization policies in the U.S. that were permitted by the Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case and impacted an estimated 60,000 people well into the middle of the 20th Century.
The nexus between the scientific racism of eugenics and AI is summed up by Dr. Jessie Daniels who, at one point in the documentary notes, “We can’t understand technology without understanding race and racism, and we can’t really understand race and racism without understanding technology.” Understanding the technology of AI in the context of white “supremacy” ideology requires an understanding of how eugenics proliferated and acted as the impetus for many of the statistical and mathematical methods larger society still uses to this day.
Karl Pearson was a British scientist and eugenicist who is credited with developing many of the statistical methods utilized in modern mathematics including the correlation coefficient and the chi-square test. Yet, as Veatch explains, Pearson was essentially developing statistical methods to rationalize the hegemony of the white race and the colonization/pillage of natural resources of the lands inhabited by the “lower races.” And AI technology is directly derived from these statistical methods which is why Veatch concludes, “Racial logics are threaded into the very fabric of the technology…in the machine, possessing it.”
The Vicious Valley of Racial Capitalism and Pernicious Financial Bubbles
As Veatch explains, the defeat of Nazi Germany certainly did not end the ideology of white “supremacy,” nor the advancement of eugenics through advanced technologies. Many race scientists continued to study new ways to continue spreading the idea that white people were the master race, and one of them was a pioneer in developing components that accelerated computer science. William Shockley is considered by many to be the “father of Silicon Valley, California.” A physicist by trade, he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics and later started his own company Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Silicon Valley where he developed the first semiconductor. Shockley later became a professor at Stanford University where his field of study focused on a race science he referred to as dysgenics - defined as, “retrogressive evolution through the disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged.”
To be clear, Shockley was a racist and white supremacist - this much is demonstrated in both his words and his research that was cited by the likes of David Duke to prove the inferiority of Black people. Shockley proclaimed in a 1980 interview with Playboy Magazine, “If one were to randomly pick ten Blacks and ten whites and try to employ them in the same kind of things, the whites would consistently perform better than the Blacks.” And in 1971 he released a report for the Review of Education Research entitled, Negro IQ Defecit: Failure of a ‘Malicious Coincidence’ Model Warrants New Research Proposals.
Veatch includes an interview with a Black woman psychiatrist, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, and Shockley. At one point during the discussion, Dr. Wesling responds to Shockley’s assertion that dysgenics isn’t racist, rather it’s a demonstration of the 1st Amendment, “The long range implications of what he is doing are no different than the propaganda campaign that Hitler and his Nazi unit carried out in Germany that ended up eliminating six million Jewish people.” Shockley’s views informed and influenced many of the people who would later make Silicon Valley an epicenter for racial capitalism and one of the wealthiest geographies in the world. One of those people was Jonathan McCarthy - who actually is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955, which he defined as, “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”
McCarthy is an interesting figure. At the beginning of the documentary he explains, with jest, that he invented the term “artificial intelligence” to raise money for a summer study that he was conducting. And to this day, AI largely remains a marketing ploy that doesn’t actually refer to one technology, rather a loosely set of connected technologies. McCarthy, who was a mentee of Shockley and also taught at Stanford University as a Professor of Computer Science, was a devout proponent of technological optimism - the idea that human thought could be precisely formalized in logic and that machines would eventually reason, solve complex problems and act as beneficial servants to humanity. Moreover, he believed that progress is solely based on technology and that the world is structured by things that can be modeled mathematically - physical systems, space, and even held that humanity is just a system that can be mathematically engineered. But McCarthy’s technocratic view of the world was overshadowed by his profound patriarchy and acrimony for collectives he viewed as enemies to progress including the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental/climate “movement.”
In 2004, McCarthy released an essay, Technology and the Position of Women. Therein he writes, “At present there are social movements and people with institutional power who regard there being fewer women than men at some level of some occupation as an injustice that must be corrected by quotas. This is a mistake and will not succeed because of differences in ability and motivations between males and females.” He articulated this through the protest of women and “minorities” being accepted to Stanford in any semblance of a significant number due to their general and biological inferiority. These views would also inform McCarthy’s embrace of neoliberalism and the general idea that any form of regulation was an impediment to technological optimism and the inevitability of full spectrum techno-hegemony. Silicon Valley embraced all of these ideas in the 1990s and produced the white men, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, who would ensconce in Silicon Valley, nationally, and globally, a culture of hyper masculinity and tech-hype that embarked on a pursuit of unlimited growth through unlimited capitalism through increased deregulation vis a vis neoliberalism.
During the late 1990s, the rapid growth and precipitous collapse of internet-based companies, many of them start ups, driven by profligate investments that produced paltry yields and anemic to no profits brought the techno-rhapsody of Silicon Valley to a screeching halt. Known as the “dot com bubble,” the U.S. experienced the consequences of unfettered capitalism with no guardrails to rein in venture capitalists who bet big on internet-based companies with little to no regard for fiscal responsibility. This did not result in the end of Silicon Valley’s elite bourgeois’ access to capital or pursuit to proliferate technological optimism. Survivors of the dot com bubble including Musk, Gates, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison were just getting started, a new generation of tech-entrepreneurs would join their ranks in what would be referred to as “Web 2.0,” and they would draw from similar paradigms as the likes of Galton, Pearson, and McCarthy to build new and improved personal data harvesting machinations that would soon influence and, in many cases, become a major component of everyday people’s everyday lives.
Web 2.0 and the Rise of the Big Tech Oligarchy
Journalist Will Kenton characterizes Web 2.0 as, “an era of the Internet marked by enhanced user engagement and the widespread creation of user-generated content, transforming online experiences with interactive platforms and social media.” Veatch’s documentary introduces us to some of the main protagonists of Web 2.0 including a then 21 year old Mark Zuckerberg who founded the Facebook platform in 2004 and released it to the public in 2006, and a then 19 year old Sam Altman who founded Loopt in 2005, a mobile social networking application while he was still a student at Stanford University. Twenty years later both are multi-billionaires and have direct access to numerous lawmakers including the President of the United States - both attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration and each donated one million dollars to his inauguration fund. Ten years prior, when Trump was first elected president, Altman, Musk, and Zuckerberg were already embarking on perfecting the AI technology that would put them in the positions they are in now to have more access to the people’s government than the people and, in the case of Musk, even being tapped to head and direct agencies of the people’s government - the now shuttered Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Veatch depicts a younger Altman in 2016 proclaiming, “I think that AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” He then announced that he co-founded a part corporation, part nonprofit, Open AI, with Elon Musk. While claiming to be committed to “AI safety” the true goal of Open AI is to replicate the same conditions that allowed the oligarchs of the Gilded Age - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Astor - to become the white masters of the world. Philanthropy for them, as it is for the likes of Musk and Altman, is nothing but a smokescreen to distract the masses from their true intent of Full Spectrum Domination. In the modern era, this “philanthropy” has a name - “effective altruism,” which claims to be about, “using scientific evidence and careful reasoning to find the best ways to help others, and putting those findings into practice.”
The name itself, effective altruism (EA), connotes a benevolent enterprise meant to serve the masses rather than the oligarchs. Yet a quick review of who its primary backers are reveals something much more sinister. EA anticipates that the most pressing challenge for humanity is to prevent a more powerful version of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), from exterminating us all. At the same time, EA believes that AGI is inevitable and, therefore, the overarching goal is to make it beneficial for humanity. But the major backers of EA, billionaire oligarchs including Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Ben Delo, Jaan Tallinn, Peter Thiel, Dustin Muskovitz, and Sam Bankman-Fried, tell a different story. And the fact that one of EA’s major backers was the scandal ridden Sam Bankman-Fried whose FTX Cryptocurrency platform filed for bankruptcy demonstrates that, “all of this money has shaped the field of AI and its priorities in ways that harm people in marginalized groups while purporting to work on ‘beneficial artificial general intelligence’ that will bring techno utopia for humanity,” according to founder and director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Timnit Gebru, who adds, “This is yet another example of how our technological future is not a linear march toward progress but one that is determined by those who have the money and influence to control it.”
The smokescreen that the likes of Musk and Altman have conjured, according to Veatch, is meant to obfuscate the fact that the institutes and think tanks associated with their EA are rooted in a new pursuit of race science, with AI as the vehicle, at “elite” universities including Oxford University and some of the Ivy League schools in the U.S. And like Stanford had the likes of Shockley and McCarthy, EA has its academic standard bearer as well - Nick Bostrom. The founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, the Swedish-born Bostrom wrote the book, Superintelligence, which argues that if created, superintelligence (which is essentially another word for AGI), would be difficult to control, and that it could take over the world in order to accomplish its goals. The book also presents strategies to help make superintelligences whose goals benefit humanity.
Yet as Veatch reveals, Bostrom himself is a modern-day eugenicist who believes superintelligence can be achieved through technological advancement or by selective embryos that reproduce favorable genes. Bostrom’s views are so extreme that journalist Andrew Anthony wrote a piece for The Guardian entitled, Eugenics on Steroids: The Toxic and Contested Legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. Therein, Anthony notes, “Fifteen months ago Bostrom was forced to issue an apology for comments he’d made in a group email back in 1996, when he was a 23-year-old postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. In the retrieved message Bostrom used the N-word and argued that white people were more intelligent than black people.” Veatch expands on this issue in the documentary, reminding viewers that while Bostrom apologized for using the N-word, he still held that white people are more intelligent than Black people and he should have stated this “fact” differently. Bostrom’s views are troubling enough - yet what is perhaps more troubling are the people who he’s influencing including Musk and Altman, according to Veatch. Even Bill Gates is featured on the cover of Bostrom’s book proclaiming, “I highly recommend this book.”
The history and current trends of AI technology and the Big Tech cartels as presented in Ghost in the Machine adroitly demonstrates the white supremacist genealogy of AI and proves that the ghost in the machine is indeed white “supremacy” ideology that informs and influences the Techbro oligarchs who produce the large language models (LLMs) that optimize and increase the efficiency of spreading paradigms that hold there is a master white race who define what humanity is and even who and what a human is. Additionally, Veatch successfully demonstrates how Big Tech oligarchs have now positioned themselves to command immense amounts of capital and use it to secure access to governmental bodies, universities, and other elements of our entire society.
Yet this is not the full story.
Next week we will explore how Ghost in the Machine exposes the myriad ways Big Tech cartels are using AI as an advanced form of neocolonialism, as well as the idea that their endgame is not to increase profits, but to increase militarism as they have now become entrenched in the defense contracting business and within the U.S. military itself. We will also discuss what we, the masses, can do to emancipate ourselves from the global incarceration of Big Tech oligarchy while dismissing the ideas that we are helpless, that Big Techno-Fascism is inevitable, and that the future belongs to the machines and their Techno-sycophants rather than the people and other species they share the planet with. .
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a son of Sierra Leone, an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, a writer and policy expert residing in the United States. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST
Navi Pillay’s participation in the International Court Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) should have disqualified her for consideration for the Nobel or any other peace prize.
The media uses vague language to protect billionaires from judgment and pressures people to pursue change through polite, respectable channels. The result is that readers become spectators of…
"For a neighbor: Hall of Fame Herb" from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Colombia's constitution recognizes Black communities as collective rights-holders, but extractivism and dispossession have undermined those guarantees, so they built their own institutions to do what…
The Black Panther Party did not begin in Oakland on October 15, 1966, but emerged from earlier organizing in Harlem and Lowndes County, Alabama. Celebrating only the famous founders erases the…
