My speaker notes & slides for the panel on 'Resisting GenAI & Big Tech in Higher Education', an event co-organised with the Climate Justice Universities Union (CJUU).

The panel: Christoph Becker (U of Toronto, CA), Mary Finley-Brook (U of Richmond, USA), Dan McQuillan (Goldsmiths U of London, UK), Sinéad Sheehan (University of Galway, Ireland) Jennie Stephens (National University of Ireland Maynooth, IE), and Paul Lachapelle (U of Montana, USA)

powerful forces but not a powerful technology

1. AI computations are correlations not causal relations, so its outputs are plausible rather than factual. It's a bullshit engine.
2. When it comes to AI, we're dealing with powerful forces but not with a powerful tech. AI is basically crap and investment in it is a bubble.
3. Large Language Models are sold to universities as learning accelerators but substitute slop for critical thinking.
4. Efforts to make AI more reliable actually make it more effective at selecting preferred, and usually "non-woke", versions of truth.
5. AI is precaritising rather than productive; it can't substitute for meaningful activity but it can make people's conditions more vulnerable.
6. So AI is extending forms of austerity prevalent since the crash of 2008 while preparing a new financial back hole all of its own.
7. AI isn't the future but its preemptive predictions and nihilistic dependencies foreclose futures for all of us.

leaderboard

1. The AI industry is always boasting about new models and improved metrics: "SOTA benchmarks across the board!"
2. But what does a leaderboard of AI metrics really represent?
3. Research suggests the effect of relying on generative AI is to make cognition 'atrophied and unprepared'.
4. The data centre energy consumption needed to deliver these numbers is measured in gigawatts.
5. The unchallenged inevitability of AI means that cloud companies can abandon their pretence at sustainability
6. It re-legitimises burning as much energy as possible, in the name of progress with a capital 'P'.
7. And AI isn't just growth-oriented, it's accelerationist; a far right pitch for power via intensified technological change.

total mobilisation

1. I think this convergence of ideology and infrastructure is what ultra-nationalist writer Ernst Jünger called ‘total mobilisation’.
2. Meaning "the conversion of life itself into energy" as nations are “driven relentlessly to seize matter, movement and force through the formalism of technoscience”.
3. This legitimates a new form of political order based on the vitalism of conflict.
4. And indeed, Big Tech has recently abandoned any commitments to the peaceful use of AI for the good of humanity blah blah.
5. Instead, it's rallying around renewed visions of national dominance through economic and especially military might.
6. But AI triumphalism is actually a diagram of underlying failure.
7. The neoliberal order is breaking down under its own contradictions and system shocks.
8. It has no answers to offer except sci-fi tech and increasing authoritarianism.

decomputing

1. I suggest we situate our resistance to AI inside and outside higher education as forms of decomputing.
2. Decomputing rejects scale because that drives carbon emissions,
3. but also because our agency is undermined by our immersion in a system of machinic relations, which includes the contemporary university
4. Decomputing is based on the principles of degrowth, care and conviviality.
5. We need systems that don't depend on continuous expansion, whether that's AI, universities or entire economies.
6. We need to start from care to counter algorithmic detachment and eugenicist abstractions.
7. Conviviality gives us ways to collectively assess tech's effects on relatedness and bio-interaction.
8. Wherever AI is proposed as ‘the answer’ there's already a structural problem.
9. One that's best addressed through the direct social relations of those most affected.

organising

1. Decomputing is a prefigurative technopolitics,
2. which tries to enact changed relations in the here-and-now.
3. One organisational form for this is worker's and people's councils on AI.
4. These are self-constituting assemblies that push back against AI bullshit,
5. while using consensus and critical pedagogy to tackle the divisive binaries we've all been programmed with.
6. Because universities are on the AI frontline, we're seeing resistance popping up all over the place.
7. Solidarity is the first priority of any of these critical collectives.
8. Some of the questions facing this emerging movement more broadly are:
9. how to move beyond reformism with minimum wasted energy and burn-out
10. how to coordinate and develop strategies without imposing rigid structure
11. how to position the push against AI as part of a movement-of-movements,
12. as part of an ecology of infrastructural intersectionalities.
13. AI isn't inevitable, but there's no going back because the past was already built on injustice; what we need to work towards are livable futures worth fighting for.