The Tanner Lectures with Ruha Benjamin | Lecture One

This talk explores how the artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. At every turn, we hear echoes, in the rhetoric of the artificial intelligentsia, of a eugenic calculus: the weak must be sacrificed for the strong to survive. They promise to guide us into the Future™, positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they help engineer the crises against which we must guard. But it is not enough to refute the legacies of eugenics animating the faux futures of the artificial intelligentsia; we must inaugurate legacies of solidarity that reflect our intrinsic interdependence as a people and a planet.

This is the first of two Tanner Lectures by Ruha Benjamin.

Host or Publisher Mahindra Humanities Center