Alignment solidifies exclusionary concept of humanity key to racism/sexism/anthropocentrism

(Daniel Estrada, Ethics@Newark, Human supremacy as posthuman risk. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–40.

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociotechnicalcritique)

These analyses also help clarify an interpretive issue in the present critique of human supremacy. Again, it is not our intention to condemn anthropocentrism in AI ethics based solely on an abstract analogy with white supremacy. The problem with human supremacy is not simply that it replicates a superficial hierarchy of structural oppression. Instead, the problem with human supremacy is how it operates as a defense of entrenched power and oppressive ideologies, in a context replete with examples of the systemic abuses of that power and the failures of those ideals. The ontological distinctions proposed between humans and machines are not simply modeled on traditional hierarchies of race and gender, they function to extend, legitimize, and calcify them within AI policy and legal theory. This is the fundamental risk of human supremacist ideology, and it should be recognizable as a risk no matter how one feels about anthropocentrist rhetoric or the moral agency of nonhumans. Identifying robots as the “correct” targets of systemic abjection not only justifies the logic, political utility, and technical infrastructure of oppression. It also demands methods for identifying and classifying humans within that framework, if only so they are not mistaken for robots. This is not unique to Bryson’s specific articulation of the view but is endemic to the very logic of human supremacy as a policy solution in AI ethics. Human supremacy attempts to protect humans from systemic abuse by constructing a political framework around systemic abuse and then declaring humans to be a privileged category exempt from that abuse. In this way, human supremacist advocates will inevitably find themselves committed to the project of fitting humans within frameworks of systemic abuse. Likewise, the entrenched powers which benefit from systemic abuse will naturally find the human supremacist defense of stable power hierarchies convenient, even flattering, and will inevitably find themselves promoting its application as ideology in AI ethics.