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Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. … The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 292 - 294)

“You heard my name when you were a pickaninny,” he said. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away. For every slave I bring home, twenty others abandon their full-moon schemes. I’m a notion of order. The slave that disappears—it’s a notion, too. Of hope. Undoing what I do so that a slave the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run, too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse.”

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 223)

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 182)

Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given. It occurred to her one night that she was one of the vengeful monsters they were scared of: She had killed a white boy. She might kill one of them next. And because of that fear, they erected a new scaffolding of oppression on the cruel foundation laid hundreds of years before.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 172)

The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 75)

Their fear called after them even if no one else did. They had six hours until their disappearance was discovered and another one or two before the posses reached where they were now. But fear was already in pursuit, as it had been every day on the plantation, and it matched their pace.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 55)

He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 52)

Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

— The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Page 29)

Researchers and corporations frequently brag that their system has achieved “superhuman” performance on various tasks. But the comparison to people implicit in the word “superhuman” belies a misapprehension of what software is. Software systems are tools, which people use to do things. We wouldn’t say that hammers have a “superhuman” ability to drive in nails, nor that airplanes have a “superhuman” ability to fly.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 166)

It’s easy to talk about benefits justifying the costs when you aren’t the ones actually paying the costs. Not only the tech barons, but also most of their highly paid employees are fairly insulated from the climate crisis, compared to climate refugees, those living in tropical zones, and precarious clickworkers who, even in the U.S., can’t afford air conditioning or easily escape from smoke-choked cities during ever-extending fire seasons.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 160)

Just because you’ve identified a social problem doesn’t mean LLMs or any other kind of so-called AI are a solution. When someone says so, the problem is usually better understood by widening the lens, looking at it in its broader context. As Shankar Narayan, the Tech and Liberty Project director for ACLU of Washington, asked regarding biased recidivism prediction systems: Why are we asking who is most likely to reoffend rather than what do these people need to give them the best chance of not reoffending? Likewise, when someone suggests a robo-doctor, robo-therapist, or robo-teacher, we should ask: Why isn’t there enough money for public clinics, mental health counseling, and schools? Text synthesis machines can’t fill holes in the social fabric. We need people, political will, and resources.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 99)