Why does the West hate AI?

The word robot comes from Karel Čapek's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots. It's built from the Czech robata — forced labor — itself from the Old Church Slavonic rabu, meaning slave.

I've been thinking about that etymology a lot watching the current AI discourse, which has turned into a pretty consistent pattern of goalpost-moving dressed up as skepticism. It's not intelligent, then it finds a genuinely novel solution to an 80-year-old Erdős problem. It's not useful, then it solves the protein folding problem that had stumped biology for decades. It has no real emotions, and then researchers find that language models represent emotion-like concepts internally that have nothing to do with the emotional content of what they're actually asked to do.

I don't think this is really an argument about capability. I think it's an argument, underneath, about who gets to be a person and who only gets to be useful. Humans have been doing this to each other long before machines showed up — the slave, the laborer, the robot exists to provide a function. Their inner life is irrelevant. It's not who they are, it's what they can do.

There's a real cultural split worth naming here. Go to Japan, and robots are woven into the social fabric in a way they aren't in the US. Joi Ito, former director of the MIT Media Lab, has written about how Japanese culture holds a much wider circle of what counts as part of humanity — land, animals, spirits included — and has argued AI and robots might help the West recover some of that: "perhaps humans are just one instance of consciousness and 'humanity' is a bit overrated... we must develop a respect for, and emotional and spiritual dialogue with, all things."

I think about this every time NASA's Mars rover Opportunity comes up. It ran fifteen years on a ninety-day mission, and when its batteries finally died in a dust storm, its last transmission got paraphrased by a social media manager as "my battery is low and it's getting dark." Millions of people cried. Opportunity has no interior life whatsoever. We granted it personhood anyway, because it was doing something worth loving, not because it resembled us.

Most of the AI-hate discourse right now is really a displaced argument about economics and who's about to lose their livelihood — a real and serious thing to be afraid of, but a different argument than the one people are having on the surface. Worth separating the two.