Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?
It addresses the societal and ethical impacts of AI for humanity and the planet, but is incremental as it critiques existing trends without proposing new technical solutions.
The paper argues that large-scale AI is exacerbating global crises like ecological and language issues, and calls for a shift in NLP towards human-centered, life-affirming alternatives.
The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises which are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. Language engineers are playing a central role, persisting with a scalability story that is failing humanity, supplying critical talent to plutocrats and kleptocrats, and creating new technologies as if the whole endeavour was value-free. We urgently need to explore alternatives, applying our collective intelligence to design a life-affirming future for NLP that is centered on human flourishing on a living planet.