An anti-fascist approach to AI means decomputing

AI’s apparatus of computation and social relations produces a nested set of inevitable harms, from states of exception to environmental degradation. A common thread running through its mathematical operations, its contemporary applications, and its accompanying ideologies is the reemergence of eugenics and authoritarian social logics.
In this talk, I will argue for an anti-fascist approach to AI that aims for alternative technopolitical outcomes. I will suggest a strategy of decomputing which combines degrowth and decolonialism in order to delegitimise AI’s extractivism and its use as a diversion from the structural failures of the status quo.
In practice, this would consist of forms of action that reject hyperscale machinery hurtful to the commonality, and instead attempt to transform collective subjectivities and technical arrangements at the same time.

Speaker: Dan McQuillan (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Biography
After a Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics, Dan McQuillan worked with people with learning disabilities and 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 currently a Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The event will be held IN PERSON and ONLINE

• PHYSICAL VENUE: Centro Nexa su Internet e Società, Politecnico di Torino, Via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1st floor) - Buzzer: Reception (follow the signs along the way).
• VIRTUAL ROOM: click here.

Event organised by the Nexa Center for Internet & Society of the Politecnico (Department of Control and Computer Engineering-DAUIN)