[Spivak]

I think you're running up against the fact that ML is a tool that can solve classification problems, which just like search in years past, has the potential to be very political.

We've mostly gotten used a world with search -- in the past it was a big political controversy that powerful groups could scan huge volumes of data for advertising, tracking, or criminal activity. There were jokes in chatrooms about using the word bomb because the FBI would pick up on it. Or that your search queries and web history would be scanned for keywords and used for ads.

Now there's this new tool that allows people/things to be grouped and classified very precisely by imprecise rules. Combine the hype about the different problems this new tool will help people solve and the inexperience that people have with the ethical ramifications of the things they build, with the crudeness of the initial implementations and it's easy to get the sense that ML will be a net bad for society -- just like search.