Salvaggio: UN AI panel adopts 'system from nowhere' framing

On a recent Responsible Bytes episode, Eryk Salvaggio walks host Dr. Zena Assaad through what he calls the 'system from nowhere,' meaning the way industry and policy documents talk about AI as if no one built it.

He extends the argument to the UN's new Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, saying its definition of AI treats the technology as a spontaneously emerging force rather than a consciously human-designed product.

'The system from nowhere,' Salvaggio writes in a companion Cybernetic Forests essay, functions as 'a rhetorical magic trick that makes both AI companies, labor and the underlying material infrastructure disappear.' He wants the standard question, 'why did the model do that?', replaced with 'what human decisions optimized the model to do that?'

What the framing erases, in his telling, includes 'the people who assemble and clean the data sets used to train them, the humans whose data it was trained on, the people living near the data centers.' Two AI experts we track shared the episode with their networks in the days after it aired.