Math isn't technology, and like you said yourself, AI is just math. Attaching emotional value to math is done incredibly frequently for all sorts of reasons.

Attaching emotional value to technology is also fine. "Machine learning is fundamentally conservative" gets the point across better than "machine learning doesn't handle change robustly," which is vague and doesn't give a person looking for something to read any reason why that would matter.

> Attaching emotional value to math is done incredibly frequently for all sorts of reasons.

Writing alarmist articles for clicks being one of those reasons.

> Attaching emotional value to technology is also fine.

Why??? Doing this with other things would be ridiculous. For example, instead of "The poor are disproportionately affected by climate change" a journalist could write "The climate hates the poor". Which subtly plays down the human cause in all of this.

> "Machine learning is fundamentally conservative" gets the point across better

It demonstrably doesn't. If you just read this thread, you'll find enough people discussing whether "conservative" has a political meaning or just a "deviation from the norm" meaning.

"doesn't handle change robustly" is a good point. Doctorow doesn't just lack a good headline, he fails to really make this point. Data bias and the context-free nature of text auto-suggest are worth discussing, though.