Abstract

Artificial intelligence is the subject of narratives that pander to and exploit the human tendency to magical thinking: by presenting machine learning systems as intelligent, immaterial, and anthropomorphic, they remove from public discourse some concrete practices of exploitation and expropriation, produce power asymmetries, and protect the business models of large intellectual monopolies. They also allow for a response in mythological terms of algorithmic fairness and AI ethics to the harm produced by algorithmic decisions rather than with political decisions on areas of associated life deduced from automated statistics