To watch other videos from the AI and the Digital series, check out the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0BjGYn0j1l-cQJamqtohtjbbp2wJN2Ey&si=OxdXZ-hToZGiqIw3

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Instead of helping to address our current crises, AI causes divisions that limit people’s life chances, and even suggests fascistic solutions to social problems. In this event, Dan McQuillan discusses his analysis of AI’s deep learning technology and its political effects and traces the ways that it resonates with contemporary political and social currents, from global austerity to the rise of the far right. This event invites us to resist AI as we know it and restructure it by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimization, through an anti-fascist approach to AI that replaces exclusions with caring, proposes people’s councils as a way to restructure AI through mutual aid and outlines new mechanisms that would adapt to changing times by supporting collective freedom.

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. His book Resisting AI: An anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence has been published in 2022 by Bristol University Press.

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and managing director of The Philosopher. His book Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society was published by Brill in 2024.

#philosophy #criticalthinking #ai #artificialintelligence #PoliticalPhilosophy #democracy

0:03:47 - Can we reform the damaging aspects of AI?

0:07:37 - The fascist resonances of AI

0:12:48 - (Dis)Passionate applications

0:16:01 - Ethics and dangers of AI

0:21:39 - Methods for political resistance

0:25:27 - System contamination and path dependency

0:30:53 - New realities - what has changed since writing the book?

0:35:39 - Q&A - Timesaving productivity

0:38:42 - Q&A - Does AI architecture imply certain types of social organisation?

0:41:54 - Q&A - Humanizing AI; the use of AI by students

0:49:11 - Q&A - Use of AI in the military and policing, and the logic of suspicion

0:53:42 - Q&A - AI and fascist aesthetics

0:56:37 - Q&A - How do we survive?