Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly radio show from WFMU about technology, how it's affecting us, and what we can do about it.

Jun 2, 2025: Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, authors, "The AI Con"

AI hype is everywhere today – from the workplace to popular culture to healthcare and beyond. We need some way to see through the hype and push back on it. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna explain how in their new book “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.”

Show Notes

• The AI Con, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell

• data-workers.org: “The Data Workers’ Inquiry is a community-based research project in which data workers join us as community researchers to lead their own inquiry in their respective workplaces.”

• DAIR: Distributed AI Research Institute

• Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Emily and Alex’s podcast (see video archive on Peertube)

• You’ll Spit Take When You Hear How Little Time Workers Are Saving With AI, According to This Huge New Study (Futurism, May 28, 2025):
After analyzing data about 25,000 workers across 7,000 workspaces, users of AI only saved on average three percent of time. And only a meager three to seven percent of those productivity gains translated into bigger paychecks, they found.

Put simply, AI isn't even close to coming for everybody's jobs, a frequently cited fear — and it's not exactly making workers more productive, either, despite the industry's many reassurances.
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Jun 2, 2025