Anyone wishing to future-proof their career should think about becoming an artificial intelligence ethicist. Scarcely a week passes without an event on algorithmic bias being held in some swanky venue. Tech companies are also falling over themselves to hire ethics experts to trumpet how responsible they are.
This fixation on ethics in AI is welcome. Algorithms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping our lives. We need to understand what they do. But this debate is in danger of obscuring discussion about a far bigger, epoch-defining struggle that tech companies are less eager to talk about: the knockdown fight for money and power.
To that extent, Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has performed a singular service in focusing on how the big tech companies are both rewriting the rules of capitalism and rewiring the circuits of power.