On "AI for Societal Impact"

Google's "societal impact" framing is doing heavy PR work—it lets them showcase AI applications without engaging the actual hard questions about who profits from AI deployment, labor displacement, or whether communities actually consent to being test cases. For practitioners, this matters because it signals how the industry packages inevitability: these projects get positioned as benevolent and inevitable rather than as business decisions with tradeoffs worth scrutinizing. You're watching a company use the language of inclusion to preempt the conversation about extraction.