This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.
Engineering graduate Jewel Sunil arrived at IDS with no formal training in the social sciences. Having observed talented women in engineering failing to progress at the same rate as their male peers, she wanted to explore the causes of this inequality and what might be done to address it.
U.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services. But as the number of civilians killed has also soared, so have fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people. The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behavior and learn its enemies’ movements. An Associated Press investigation found after the surprise attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, its use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology skyrocketed.
in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with.
this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.
Jennifer 🍄
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Nanoraptor