In 2025, there seem to be as many narratives about AI as there are startups peddling the stuff. Will it transform society into a utopia, freeing us from all responsibilities, or will it come to life and kill us all? And who benefits from those outcomes, anyway?
According to esteemed sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, the answer is clear: no matter which way you slice it, the AI future is for the rich.
“When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled,” Cottom said in a recent panel at the Urban Consulate in Detroit. “I think that, y’know this promise of an artificial intelligence future, is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us.”
“If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled — AI is already here, the end is already here — then we will create that for them,” Cottom continued. “My most daring idea is to refuse,” she said to applause.
Cottom cuts to the heart of an issue that both AI doomers and AI boosters seem to take for granted: that an AI-dominated future isn’t inevitable.
Given the development plateau tech companies seem to be running into these days, a future built on large language models (LLMs) is far from a lock. (Consider, for example, the fact that after a very recent December update, ChatGPT couldn’t even generate an accurate alphabet poster for preschoolers.)
“The proposal for a post-human future is one where there will be human beings who will just be treated inhumanely,” Cottom said. “We’re not going to stop making people or humans, they’re just saying we’re not going to treat you as humans. And I refuse. And I think that we all can.”
Cottom points to the historical record — for example, the fact that chattel slavery was at one time seen as a preordained fact of life, a myth spread by the wealthiest members of that bygone age. “I think that being Black is an act of refusal, I think we know how to refuse,” she told the audience. “I think that everybody else needs to learn it from us.”
And while Cottom’s contention is a bleak one — the idea that the most powerful billionaires in the world are using AI to seize total control of humanity — she isn’t short on hope. “I think refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansion vision of the future, than the one that is telling us that the future is already settled and decided. That’s my daring idea.”
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