I've been in or around the AI for nearly two decades by now, and I can assure you that the shift in mindset is actually something quite new.
Until a couple of years ago AI was seen as a tool that could empower and augment human workers, not replace them. Just like a calculator is supposed to make multiplications faster for accountants, not replace them.
It was seen as a tool that could help doctors find tumors in X-ray scans, help customer service operators to get a glimpse of the most common complaints in a huge pool of tickets, help scientists find correlations and patterns in huge datasets, help people write emails without grammar mistakes, help police officers to sift through massive volumes of camera data to find footages where crimes were committed, and help programmers find security bugs in their code.
But until 2020 there's wasn't a lot of talk about replacing instead of augmenting. And that's because the field was still mostly in the hands of academia (or corporate employees with tight ties with academia).
"Let machines take care of repetitive error-prone tasks so humans can focus on what they're good at" has been the mantra for a long time.
Then the MBA parasites sensed that the bubble that they had invested on (Web 3.0 and crypto) was deflating, and they needed a new wagon to jump on, and they picked AI.
And suddenly people like Timnit Gebru (she/her). (npub1z40…s3fq) started to get fired, big companies started getting rid of their AI ethics teams, OpenAI ditched all of its pretences of being a no-profit working on openness and fairness just to get to market before others did, and it's been a race to the bottom since then.
But, like in all technological innovations, things don't have to be this way - just like some of the promises of Blockchain didn't deserve to go wasted in the speculation games of a bunch of day-traders.
I wouldn't blame the technologies, I would blame the people, and the lack of mechanism of self-preservation that prevent whole technological fields to fall prey to this kind of abusers.
