Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
AuthorDan Mc Quillan
LanguageEnglish
SubjectsArtificial Intelligence
PublisherBristol University Press
Publication date
2022
Pages190
ISBN978-1529213508

Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence is a book on artificial intelligence (AI) by Dan McQuillan, published in 2022 by Bristol University Press.

Synopsis

Mc Quillan's Resisting AI[1] contrasts optimistic visions about AI's potential by arguing that AI may best be seen as a continuation and reinforcement of bureaucratic forms of discrimination, violence, ultimately fostering authoritarian outcomes.[2] For the author AI's promises of objective calculability is antithetical to an egalitarian and just society.[3][4]

Main

The author uses the expression ‘AI violence’ to describe how – based on opaque proprietary algorithms – various actors can inflict damage or discriminate categories of people from accessing jobs, loans, medical care or other benefits.[2]

The analysis goes beyond the known critique of AI systems fostering precarious labour markets, addressing necropolitics, the politics of who is entitled to live, and who to die.[2]

Although the author offers a brief history of machine learning at the beginning of the book – with its need for 'hidden and undercompensated labour',[5] he is concerned more with the social impacts of AI rather than with its technical aspects.[6][5] McQuillan sees AI as the continuation of existing bureaucratic systems that already marginalize vulnerable groups - aggravated by the fact that AI systems trained on existing data are likely to reinforce existing discriminations, e.g. in attempting to optimize welfare distribution based on existing data patterns,[6] ultimately creating a system of “self-reinforcing social profiling.[7]

In elaborating on the continuation between existing bureaucratic violence and AI, he reconnect to Hannah Arendt concept of thoughtlessness. The thoughtless bureaucrat of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil[8] becomes now the algorithm that, lacking intent, cannot be accountable, and is thus endowed with an 'algorithmic thoughtlessness'.[1]: 62–63 

AI can support the diffusion of states of exception:

AI has an inbuilt tendency toward creating partial states of exception. AI is not only a technology that is impossible to properly regulate but a mechanism for multiplying exceptions more widely.[1]: 75 

An example of a scenario where AI systems of surveillance could bring discrimination to a new high is the initiative to create LGBT-free zones in Poland.).[1]: 76–77 [6]

Suggested strategies

Skeptical of ethical regulations to control the technology, Mc Quillan suggests people's councils and workers’ councils, and other forms of citizens agency to resist AI.[6] A chapter entitled 'Post-Machine Learning' makes an appeal for resistance via currents of thought from Feminist science (standpoint theory), Post-normal science (Extended Peer Communities), and New materialism. Among the virtuous example of resistance - to be possibly adopted by the AI workers themselves - Mc Quillan notes (p. 126,141[1]) the Lucas Plan of the workers of Lucas Aerospace Corporation,[9] where a workforce declared redundant took control reorienting the enterprise toward useful products.[10] In an intetview about the book, McQuillan defines himself as an 'AI abolitionist'.[11]

Critique

Notwithstanding the ‘fascist’ in the title of the work, the author notes[10] that while not all AI is fascist, this emerging technology of control may end up being deployed by fascist or authoritarian regimes. On the critical side, more than one review[3][6] points to a partial disconnect between the broad social critique of the work and its anchoring to the workings of AI.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, Bristol University Press.
  2. 1 2 3 Rossi, N. (2022, July 12). Resisting AI - A Review. Retrieved from https://orwellsociety.com/resisting-ai-a-review/.
  3. 1 2 Selkälä, T. (2022). Healthily futile: a quest for a different AI. Justice, Power and Resistance, 5(3), 322–330.
  4. ↑ McKenna, B. (2023). Resisting artificial intelligence as we know it. Computer Weekly, 14–14.
  5. 1 2 Golumbia, David (October 1, 2023). "Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, by Dan McQuillan". Critical AI. 1 (1–2). doi:10.1215/2834703x-10734967. S2CID 263647209.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Stürmer, M., & Carrigan, M. (2023, November 16). Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence – review. Retrieved from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/11/16/resisting-ai-an-anti-fascist-approach-to-artificial-intelligence-review/
  7. ↑ Knowles, B., Fledderjohann, J., Richards, J. T., & Varshney, K. R. (2023). Trustworthy AI and the Logics of Intersectional Resistance. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 172–182.
  8. ↑ Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil de Hannah Arendt, Faber & Faber.
  9. ↑ "The Lucas Plan: How Greens and trade unionists can unite in common cause". Theecologist.org. 2 November 2016.
  10. 1 2 Klovig Skelton, S. (2023). AI interview: Dan McQuillan, critical computing expert. Computer Weekly. Retrieved from https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366537843/AI-interview-Dan-McQuillan-critical-computing-expert.
  11. ↑ McQuillan, D., & Kremakova, M. (2023). Dan McQuillan in conversation: Big data, deep learning, and hold the apocalypse. The Sociological Review Magazine. doi:10.51428/tsr.inuk8253.
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