osfa_2030Apr 22, 2025
Rereading "Resisting AI. An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence" by Dan MQuillan, 2022.
Trying to deepen in his argument of the resonances and affinities between the technologies of AI themselves and fascism. They have to do with classification and discrimination and the reinforcement of power structures as they are. With the black box character of neural networks' computation, the practices of datafication and optimization, the option of technosolutionism vs attempting to understand structural causes... Let's see if I can make a clear blog post synthesizing the topic...
I believe it isn't a very obvious argument. It might have sounded hyperbolic some years ago. But now it sounds pretty explanatory of nowadays developments.
#ResistingAI #McQuillan
Estelle PlatiniMay 9, 2023

#Quotes:

Mandy Brown: "One of the questions I always ask of stories is how they work. Who do they serve? Who benefits?"

Dan McQuillan: "The hierarchy of intelligence, which comes automatically with the concept of #AGI, merges with the idea that such a hierarchy already exists in humans. This belief is shared by those AI experts who welcome AGI and those who rail against it in apocalyptic terms; the latter simply fear that they will lose their superior status to a machine. On a pragmatic level, the notion of a natural hierarchy of #intelligence isn’t a problem for engineering and business elites as it provides a rationale for their privilege, but the historical significance of this perspective is the way it has been deployed to legitimize oppressive social and political orders."

― Dan #McQuillan, writing in his book "Resisting AI", cited by Mandy Brown @aworkinglibrary at https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/smoke-screen

Smoke screen

Interrogating the story behind “artificial intelligence.”

A Working Library