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The Rise of Antihumanism
Crawford's 2023 lecture identifying the tacit ideology that legitimizes replacing human judgment with automated systems through four premises about human inadequacy.
The Rise of Antihumanism is Crawford's 2023 lecture articulating the tacit ideology that legitimizes the progressive replacement of human judgment by automated systems. The lecture identifies four premises operating beneath the surface of much contemporary technology discourse: human beings are stupid, we are obsolete, we are fragile, and we are hateful. Each premise captures something real about human limitation. Taken together, deployed as a justification for replacing human agency with algorithmic governance, they constitute what Crawford calls "apologetics for a further concentration of wealth and power." The lecture's argument is that antihumanism operates most effectively when it remains tacit — when it shapes technology development without being explicitly defended or even recognized as an ideology.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The lecture's canonical illustration is the Google self-driving car incident of 2009, in which the car's algorithms froze at a four-way intersection and the Google engineer's response was that human beings need to be "less idiotic." The response is revealing because it positions human unpredictability as the problem