The Myth of Good AI (manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk)

Arshin Adib‑Moghaddam’s The Myth of Good AI (eBook, May 2025) is a polemical, interdisciplinary critique that dismantles the comforting narrative pushed by tech firms that AI is inherently beneficial. Drawing on philosophy, medicine, media studies, international affairs and critical theory, the book argues that “good AI” rhetoric masks systemic harms—algorithmic discrimination, labor exploitation, massive energy use, geopolitical bias, and new forms of surveillance and coercion. Chapters such as “Debugging machine ethics,” “Eugenic racism,” “Techno‑Orientalism,” and “The future of scientific torture” signal the author’s focus on structural and geopolitical dimensions often elided by mainstream AI ethics, and the book explicitly calls for a decolonized, Global Thought perspective on technological critique. For the AI/ML community this is a consequential provocation: it reframes technical problems (bias, robustness, transparency) as symptoms of deeper socio‑political design choices and power asymmetries. Practically, Adib‑Moghaddam’s work urges researchers and practitioners to broaden datasets and evaluation criteria, account for environmental and labor externalities, resist Eurocentric governance frameworks, and prioritize rights‑based, multidisciplinary oversight over techno‑solutionism. The book doesn’t stop at diagnosis—it equips readers with conceptual tools and strategies for survival and resistance, making it a timely call to reorient AI work toward justice, accountability, and global plurality.