'Resisting AI' with Dan McQuillan

Technology and AI are often thought of as being neutral, objective, technical, or apolitical. Our conversation with Dan McQuillan will examine the political stakes of AI, asking what can and should be done—particularly by students and universities.

About the speaker

Dr. Dan McQuillan is a Senior Lecturer in Critical AI at Goldsmiths, University of London. After a Ph.D in Experimental Particle Physics, Dan worked with people learning disabilities & mental health issues, created websites with asylum seekers, ran social tech camps in Kyrgyzstan and Sarajevo and worked for Amnesty International and the NHS. He is the author of 'Resisting AI - An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence'.

About the series

Critical AI Talks invites leading AI researchers to explore the human and societal impacts of GenAI. Join us at this and other upcoming talks and learn more about the Critical AI Talks series here: https://csma.humanities.mcmaster.ca/our-community/critical-ai/

Timeline and notes

3:15 What is AI?

7:21 How is AI political?

- AI alters the distribution of power in the world, intensifying asymmetries of power

- perceptions of AI’s “objectivity” have shifted with the rise of GenAI; its failings are more on display

- AI is individualizing and thus extends neoliberalism; AI extends the politics of scarcity

- AI excises relationships and relationality; it is individualizing and de-relationalizing

- Predictive AI was tied to austerity

- AI does statistical redlining

- the fundamental operations of AI are based on correlation, not causation; they don’t have an understanding of ‘ground truth’ and context, what is really going on; instead it can find a group or sub-group or set of identities that can be blamed for the situation; it’s an “automated stigmatization” and, as such, dangerous in the hands of institutions and forms of politics that are keen on stigmatization

21:31 How is AI “brittle” or fragile?

- AI can break down in many ways

- AI relies on a huge amount of data, missing data is a “giant game of whack-a-mole”;

- People can deal with the unexpected but AI can’t

engineers are quite open about the fact that they don’t know what’s going on “under the hood”; we’re part of a giant social experiment

- Artificial General Intelligence is the goal of AI companies—an idea based in eugenics, white and masculine supremacy, and engenders a “closed loop” that fuses with global extractivism to keep itself going.

30:55 The usual remedies proposed to solve the problems of AI are inadequate:

- technosolutionism; efforts to de-bias AI, the data and number of parameters is too vast and - the world is too complex to “debias” without creating new distortions

- the problems with explainability and laws that require an explanation for decisions made by AI

- the inadequacy of having a “human in the loop”

- the inadequacy of legislation

- the problem with the false citations tied to AI search results

40:30 What should be done?

- Councils, solidarity, mutual aid, collective care, decomputing, and degrowth

- AI forms a feedback loop with current trajectories of society; it will make people’s jobs more vulnerable to the threat of replacement with AI

- AI only functions with vast quantities of data; social media made this available

- Ai requires extreme centralization;

- a cottage or community version can’t really exist; AI intensifies concentrations of power

- AI isn’t new; it intensifies problems that already exist, so changing AI requires changing underlying structural issues

- the opposite of AI’s decontextualization is life and interdependency, which is messy

- decomputing is how to bring about ecological sustainability from the bottom up

- councils – assemblies – are people coming together in a horizontal peer-to-peer way to tackle the problems of their life

- this deals with 1) the material conditions, and 2) the subjectivities that AI creates; this way we can come together to empower and transform ourselves and develop counter-power

49:27 What should universities do?

- Universities are about imagining possibilities

- Universities are fundamentally social, and can be a cradle of politics

- McQuillan’s lecture “The Role of the University is to Resist AI” discussed (https://www.danmcquillan.org/cpct_seminar.html)

- Universities are being treated as having measurable outputs;

- the defence against AI is a defence of education

- teaching staff are targeted for staffing reductions

- Use of AI for teaching and research is degrading to cognition

- Decomputing involves degrowth

- AI is giving up independent thought

- Ivan Illich’s ideas of conviviality and tools

- “in the increasingly authoritarian world that we’re slipping into, the idea of education itself, definitely the idea of critical thought, is seen as unwelcome”

- AI is dependent on energy, and the geopolitics of AI centres on this; universities can reveal this and the previous ways people have failed to make change

1:08:45 Closing