Having worked in the field of artificial intelligence for over 30 years, Smith reveals evidence that the mechanical actors in our lives do indeed have, or at least express, morals: they're just not the morals of the progressive modern society we imagined we were moving towards. Instead, we are beginning to see increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed, segregation and mass coercion.
It is easy to assume that this is the result of programmer prejudice or the product of dark forces manipulating the Internet. But what if there is something more fundamental and explicitly mechanical at play, something inherent in the technology itself?
Offering a rigorous, fresh perspective, Rage Inside the Machine challenges the long-held assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Shedding light on little-known history and investigating the complex connections between scientific philosophy, institutional prejudice, and new technology, this book demonstrates how centuries-old, non-scientific ideas are encoded deep within our modern technological infrastructure, and it reveals how new thinking and research could help us fix it.