Deep Bureaucracy and Autonomist AI
Dan McQuillan · The MIT Press eBooks · 2020
AI is here at last.But what exactly is it, and what is it going to change?The AI emerging from Silicon Valley and Beijing is certainly uncanny, but it doesn't meet the expectations created by the movies.It's heralded as the birth of near-human intelligence but seems to be warping social relations wherever it appears, whether in social media or new structures of precarious employment.Given the global rise in reactionary politics, the future arriving at the same moment that the far-right past has returned should provoke skepticism.While talking heads focus on some imagined superintelligence, actually existing AI is rolling over marginalized communities in the here and now.An AI future seems nonnegotiable, but the nature of neoliberalism and the legacy of colonialism should already warn against a destiny driven by deep learning.I'm suggesting that AI is an intensification of what's gone before rather than any kind of quantum leap, specifically, as an intensification of bureaucracy and the derivatives market.Doubling down on distributed manipulation is a political move that brings specific harms in the form of segregation and automated scarcity, so I also propose a standpoint and a set of tactics that push for an alter-AI: that is, for an approach that recomposes AI according to an alternative vision of togetherness.