The one line you've pulled out is a quote from someone else and not the words of the authors of this paper, to be clear.
Here's the full context:
1 Overview
The culture of AI is imperialist and seeks to expand the kingdom of the machine. The AI community is well organized and well funded, and its culture fits its dreams: it has high priests, its greedy businessmen, its canny politicians. The U.S. Department of Defense is behind it all the way. And like the communists of old, AI scientists believe in their revolution; the old myths of tragic hubris don’t trouble them at all.
Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow (1985, pp. 13–14)
This paper sets out our expert position on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies permeating the higher education sector, demonstrating how this directly erodes our ability to function (see also our Open Letter, Guest, van Rooij, et al. 2025).
(the rest elided)
If you aren’t familiar with the term, you might want to consider reading about the “AI winter”. To me, it’s not surprising at all that the quote would come from 1985.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
The book can be bought here: https://www.minotavrosbooks.com/pages/books/011217/tony-solo...
Other's also voiced their concerns at the time:
Sherry Turkle https://monoskop.org/images/5/55/Turkle_Sherry_The_Second_Se...
Tom Athanasiou ghostwrote Hubert Dreyfus's book 'Mind over Machine' (1986) https://www.ecoequity.org/about/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...
Athanasiou, Tom (1985). “Artificial intelligence: cleverly disguised politics”. In: Compulsive technology: computers as culture. Ed. by Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow. Free Association Books, pp. 13–35
Carl Mitcham https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222771271_Computers...
Other articles citing these early critics:
Special Issue Artificial intelligence through the lenses of Marxism and critical thinking https://periodicos.ufs.br/eptic/article/download/21789/16168...
Artificial intelligence and the ideology of capitalist reconstruction https://ouci.dntb.gov.ua/en/works/lRaVX6M4/
maybe the person you're responding to used chatgpt to extract a section of text to be critical of it? lol
I just had a conversation with free chatgpt about when a sports game started. Chatgpt got it hilariously wrong, like a time it couldn't possibly be given the other things I know about the game. I just didn't want to trawl through search results to find out, so thought AI could be a nice shortcut. Mistake, I guess. Then I tried to tell it how and why it was wrong, with further hilariously wrong attempts to respond from the AI. I couldn't help but give a few more pointless clarifying replies, even though I knew I would get nothing out of it and the AI would learn nothing. I seem to do this every month or so and then get frustrated with how useless it is and then swear off it for another month.
Did you ask it to search the Internet as a part of your request? It is still extremely imperfect, but that typically helps it get basic details correct. At least for me at any rate.
Wow it's just as stupid and ahistorical in context! Every revolution's fighters believed in it despite the utter catastrophe that came about afterwards. The only reason to point to that instead of, idk, Belgium's capitalist turn leading to the crimes against humanity in the Congo, is to score points with credulous burgers.