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Emily Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025), written with Alex Hanna, is a compelling antidote to the techno-optimism paraded by Marc Andreessen and other cyber-futurists. Artificial intelligence (AI), Bender and Hanna argue, is nothing but a marketing term. AI tools do not think. They do not understand. They are not sentient. They do not possess consciousness. They cannot empathise.
