AI Is Dehumanization Technology

Posted by smartmic 6/26/2025

AI Is Dehumanization Technology(thedabbler.patatas.ca)

157 points | 172 commentspage 2

hayst4ck 6/26/2025|

To call AI a dehumanization technology is like calling guns a murder technology.

There is obviously truth to that, but guns are also used for self defense and protecting your dignity. Guns are a technology, and technology can be used for good or evil. Guns have been used to colonially enslave people, but also been used to gain independence.

I disagree with the assessment that AI is intrinsically dehumanizing. AI is a tool, a very powerful tool, and because the very rich in America doesn't see the people they rule as humans of equal dignity, the technology itself betrays their feelings.

Attacking the technology is wrong, the problem is not the technology but that every company has a tyrant king at it's helm who answers to no one because they have purchased the regulators that might have bound their behavior, meaning that their are no consequences for a CEO/King of a company's misdeeds. So every company's king ends up using their company/fiefdom to further their own personal ambitions of power and nobody is there to stop them. If the technology is powerful, then failure to invest in it, while other even more oppressive regimes do invest in it, potentially gives them the ability to dominate you. Imagine you argue nuclear weapons are a bad technology, while your neighbor is busy developing them. Are you better off if your neighbor has nuclear weapons and you don't?

The argument that AI is a dehumanization technology is ultimately an anarchist argument. Anarchy's core belief is that no one should have power to dominate anyone else, which inevitably means that no one is able to provide consequences for anyone who ambitiously betrays that belief system. Reality does not work that way. The only way to provide consequences to a corrupt institution is an even more powerful institution based on collective bargaining (founded by the threat of consequences for failing to reach a compromise, such as striking). There is no way around realpolitik, you must confront pragmatic power relationships to have a cogent philosophy.

The author is mistaking AI for wealth disparity. Wealth is power and power is wealth, and when it is so concentrated, it puts bad actors above consequences and turns tools that could be used for the public good into tools of oppression.

We do not primarily have an AI problem, but a wealth concentration problem and this is one of many manifestation of it.

k__ 6/26/2025|

To be fair, people only need guns to protect themselves because guns literally are murder tech.

hayst4ck 6/26/2025||

That is a truth but not the truth. By framing guns as a murder technology, you ignore that they are also a self defense technology, equalizing technology, or any other set of valid frames.

My point was that guns can be used for murder, in the same way that AI can be used to influence or surveil, but guns are also what you use to arrest people, fight oppressors and tyrants, and protect your property. Fists, knives, bows and arrows, poison, bombs, tanks, fighter jets, and drones are all forms of weapons. The march of technology is inevitable, and it's important not to be on the losing side of it.

What the technology is capable of us less interesting then who has access to it and the power disparity that it creates.

The authors argument is that AI is a (1) high leverage technology (2) in the hands of oligarchs.

My argument is that the fact that it is a high leverage technology is not as interesting, meaningful, or important as the existence of oligarchs who do not answer to any regulatory body because they have bought and paid for it.

The author is arguing that a particular weapon is bad, but failing to argue that we are in a class war that we are losing badly. The author is focusing on one weapon being used to wage our class war, instead of arguing about the cost of losing the classwar.

It is not AI de-humanizing us, but wealth disparity that is de-humanizing us, because there is nothing forcing the extremely wealthy to treat others with dignity. AI is not robbing people of dignity, ultra wealthy people are robbing people of dignity using AI. AI is not dehumanizing people. Ultra wealthy people are using AI to dehumanize people. Those are different arguments with different implications and prescriptions on how to act or what to do.

AI is bad is a different argument than oligarchs are bad.

dwaltrip 6/26/2025||

The meat of the post does not depend on the characterization AI as “mere statistical correlations” that produces “plausible sounding word salad”.

I encourage people to not get too hung up on that and look at the arguments about the effects on society and how we function as humans.

I have very mixed feelings about AI, and this blog hits some key notes for me. If I have time later I will try to highlight those.

adamc 6/26/2025||

I think it's an interesting piece, and calls us to consider how the technology will actually be used.

A lot of things that are possible enable evil purposes as or more readily than noble ones. (Palantir comes to mind.) I think we have an ethical obligation to be aware of that and try to steer to the light.

gchamonlive 6/26/2025||

Everything is dehumanization technology when society is organized to foster competition and narcissism and not cooperation and care.

Technology is always an extension of the ethos. It doesn't stand on its own, it needs and reflects the mindset of humans.

dandanua 6/26/2025||

Technology that ultimately breaks power balance in a society is asking for fascism to come. Without strong and working checks and balances the doom scenario is inevitable. Yet, we are witnessing the destruction of our previous, weaker checks and balances. This will only accelerate us to the dead end.

serbuvlad 6/26/2025||

The fundamental advantage of our society as designed is that it weaponizes narcissism, and makes narcissists do useful stuff for society.

Don't care about competition? Find a place where rent prices are reasonable and you'll find it's actually surprisingly easy to earn a living.

Oh, but you want the fancy stuff, don't you?

munificent 6/26/2025|||

I suspect that if you find a place where rent prices are reasonable, you'll find it's actually surprisingly hard to find job there that pays a good wage, healthcare that keeps you healthy, decent schools to educate your children, and a community that shares your values and interests.

People don't move to high cost of living areas because they want nice TVs. Fancy stuff is the same price everywhere.

serbuvlad 6/26/2025||

I live in Romania so I have different problems. I understand that Americans have problems with rent and healthcare. We have problem with other stuff, like food prices.

But at the end of the day, it's extremely unhealthy to let these problems force us into feeling like we have to make a lot of money. You can find cheap solutions for almost everything almost everywhere if you compromise.

munificent 6/26/2025||

I don't think people feel like they have to make a lot of money.

I think they seek jobs and places to live that give them the maximum overall benefit. I currently live in Seattle, which is quite expensive.

If there was another city like Seattle with the same schools, healthcare, climate, and culture, but cheaper housing, I'd move there as long as the salaries there weren't so much lower that it more than canceled out the benefit of cheaper housing.

The problem in the US is that even though some cities are quite expensive, they are still overall the most economical choice for people who can get good jobs in those cities. The increased pay more than makes up for the higher prices.

gchamonlive 6/26/2025|||

I'm talking about narcissism as in Burnout Society.

Give the book a go if you haven't. It lays out many of the fundamental problems of current social organization way better than I can.

> Oh, but you want the fancy stuff, don't you?

Just some food for thought, though. Is weaponizing hyperpositivity the only way to produce fancy stuff? Think about it, you'll see by yourself this is a false dichotomy embedded in a realism that prevents us from improving society.

drellybochelly 6/26/2025||

It can be, but on the other hand its made me think in a radically different way about concepts in humanity.

tolerance 6/26/2025||

This article is informative, but I can't imagine it would do anything to spur the conscious of people who use AI in ways other than the harmful examples it illustrates.

davesque 6/26/2025||

I'm not usually a fan of progressive politics, but I thought Bernie Sanders made a great point the other day when he simply asked why adoption of AI would lead to layoffs instead of a 4-day work week. I don't think the question is naive. There really doesn't seem to be any good reason why the value of AI technology couldn't be distributed this way today, only that the people in charge of it don't want to do that, because they are so accustomed to claiming value instead of sharing it.

mulippy 6/26/2025||

pedestrian rehash of standard ai critique talking points without novel insight. author conflates pattern recognition with "dehumanization" through definitional sleight-of-hand - classic motte-and-bailey where reasonable concerns about bias/labor displacement get weaponized into apocalyptic framing. the empathy-as-weakness musk quote does heavy lifting for entire thesis but represents single data point from notoriously unreliable narrator. building systematic critique around elon's joe rogan appearance is methodologically weak. technical description of llms as "word salad generators" betrays surface-level understanding. dismissing statistical pattern matching as inherently meaningless ignores that human cognition relies heavily on similar processes. the "no understanding" claim assumes consciousness/intentionality as prerequisite for useful output, which is philosophically naive. bias automation concerns valid but not uniquely ai-related - bureaucratic systems have always encoded societal prejudices. author ignores potential for ai to surface and quantify existing biases that human administrators would otherwise perpetuate invisibly. deskilling argument contradicts itself - simultaneously claims ai doesn't improve productivity while arguing it threatens jobs. if tools are genuinely useless, market forces would eliminate them. more likely: author conflates short-term adjustment costs with long-term displacement effects. "surveillance technology" characterization relies on guilt-by-association rather than technical analysis. any information processing system could theoretically enable surveillance - this includes spreadsheets, databases, filing cabinets. the public sector romanticism is revealing. framing government work as inherently altruistic ignores institutional incentives, regulatory capture, and bureaucratic self-preservation. "mission-oriented" workers can implement harmful policies with genuine conviction. strongest section addresses automation bias and human-in-the-loop failures, but author doesn't engage with literature on hybrid human-ai systems or institutional design solutions.

-claude w/ eigenbot absolute mode system setting

bentograd 6/26/2025|

I mean, this really proves the point. You dehumanize the author and anyone who even attempts to read this slop by deferring your thinking to the machine, as if this kind of human interaction was not worthy to be had. Worst of all, you dehumanize yourself.

npteljes 6/26/2025|

>The push to adopt AI is, at its core, a political project of dehumanization

I agree with the general sentiment, but absolutely disagree with this claim. The push to adopt AI is a gold rush, not any coordinated thing. I think in the political arena they don't give a single f about how humanizing or dehumanizing a thing is, especially if it's this abstract as "AI" or whatever. Everyone out there is there to further their own limited scope goal, according to whatever idea they have on how to achieve that. AI entered the public consciousness and so, companies are now in a race to not get behind. Politicians do enter into the picture, but mostly as ones who enjoy the fruit of the AI effort, it being a good public distraction, and an effective tool in creating propaganda. But nowhere near is it a primary goal, nor does it nefariously further any underlying primary goal, such as dehumanizing the people. It's merely a tool, and a phenomenon with beneficial side effects.

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