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The AI Con, Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna 

& 

The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster

Join us at the Data Ethics & Society Reading Group on Wednesday 13^th May at 12:00-13:00.

The event is FREE to attend, but places are limited so please sign up to reserve your spot! (Registration closes on Friday 8^th May at 17:00)

We're covering two books written over 100 years apart that are still as relevant as each other: a century-old piece of speculative fiction and a sharp critique of the AI industry.

The AI Con: Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna

‘Hype looks and smells fishy: it twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines.’

The AI Con offers a rigorous, sceptical account of how artificial intelligence is being packaged and sold to governments, businesses, and the public, and asks who really benefits from the hype.

The Machine Stops: E.M. Forster

'We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.’

First published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909, Forster's novella imagines a future in which humanity lives underground, entirely dependent on a vast machine that mediates all communication and meets every need. Its anxieties about technological dependence and the erosion of direct human experience seem less like science fiction and more like life in 2026.

The Machine Stops has aged out of copyright laws and is available to read for free online. At 12,000 words it should take only an hour or less to finish, making it a fabulous add-on The AI Con.

Where The Machine Stops imagines the endpoint of technological dependency, The AI Con examines the machinery driving us there. Together, these two works raise questions that sit at the heart of what this group is about: power, infrastructure, accountability, and what we lose when we stop asking hard questions.

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Henry B, Henry P, Nicola, Marzena and Sarah (organisers of Data Science: Ethics & Society Reading Group events)