Episode 14 – AI is Already Existential: The Case for an Anti-fascist Resistance

Description:

AI already poses an immediate danger to our freedom, livelihood, and even our very survival. We don’t need to wait on the singularity for AI to become existential – the resistance starts now.

In this episode, Dan McQuillan (Goldsmiths Department of Computing) critiques AI from an informed, technical basis. We explore the risks of currently existing models, from shaping our subjectivities to eradicating marginalized groups. And finally, Dan makes the case for an anti-fascist alternative – radical care as the antidote to careless tech-solutionism.

I’m currently running a fundraiser to cover my 2023 expenses for this show. Support my work here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/solarpunkcast

Find Dan on Twitter, Mastodon, or visit his website

Sources:

• Dan’s book – Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
• Dan McQuillan – Mental health and artificial intelligence: losing your voice (A poem with citations? Amazing!)
• Miranda Fricker – Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
• Achille Mbembe – Necropolitics
• Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz – Science for the post-normal age
• Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Chile’s Cybersyn project)
• The Cybernetic Brain – Sketches of Another Future (Dan’s recommendation on Cybernetics)
• Radical Technology (illustrated by Clifford Harper)

Further Reading:

• María Puig de la Bellacasa – Matters of Care
• Isabelle Stengers – Cosmopolitics I
• Donna Haraway – Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
• Using ChatGPT in mental health care (Koko)
  • Startup Uses AI Chatbot to Provide Mental Health Counseling and Then Realizes It ‘Feels Weird’
  • Controversy erupts over non-consensual AI mental health experiment
  • ‘Horribly Unethical’: Startup Experimented on Suicidal Teens on Social Media With Chatbot
• The Lucas Plan
• Articles on GKN factory occupation in Italy:
  • Italy’s Longest-Ever Factory Occupation Shows How Workers Can Transform Production
  • An Eco-Revolution of the Working Class? What We Can Learn from the Former GKN Factory in Italy
• My previous episode on mental illness and care at the margins