AI is a Morbid Symptom of the Interregnum

Presented by Dan McQuillan, Senior Lecturer in Critical AI at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Co-hosted by the Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies and the FIMS Rogers Chair.

Abstract: Let us begin from the contradiction that is AI. What does it mean that a technology which is functionally incapable of delivering on its claims continues to be the site of massive financial and strategic investment? This question can be fruitfully answered by treating AI as a diagnostic whose failings shed a light on underlying structural transformations. AI is a fake solution to real crises, especially the breakdown of the neoliberal world order and the unsettling of patriarchal subjectivity. Like all solutionism, it actually amplifies the very problems it’s intended to solve. The particular pathologies of AI, especially scaling and accelerationism, are symptoms of the actual restructuring taking place in relation to energy politics and increasing authoritarianism.

As a technopolitics of the interregnum, AI is a stark warning about the way hegemonic power intends to maintain control under changing conditions. It is also, therefore, a heuristic for possible alternatives. A movement of decomputing is one that tackles technology as the convergence of politics and subjectivity, as as raising the question of what kind of society we want to live in and who we need to be in order to inhabit that society. The antidote it proposes to the existing state of things involves degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to tool development that centres interdependence and situatedness. When tackling the rapacious energy and cooling demands of data centres, for example, decomputing turns the question to one of the re-socialisation of all of society’s energy and water resources. Decomputing calls for an infrastructural intersectionality that prefigures the material commons and the condition of care without categorisations.

Speaker Bio: Dan McQuillan is a Senior Lecturer in Critical AI. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from Imperial College, London. He is the author of Resisting AI - An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Bristol University Press, 2022).