[AI Skeptics] Disabling Intelligences chapter 4
Hello! We're continuing to read Disabling Intelligences by Rua Williams.
- Disabling Intelligences chapter 4: "Social Stratification Engines and the Ideology of Replacement"
- "The Wheelchair-to-Warfare Pipeline" w/ Liz Jackson and Rua Williams (04/11/24) (Death Panel podcast & transcript if you'd like to read instead)
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Ok, let's get back to the rest of the thing.
routine stuff
If you've read these emails before, this is mostly the same stuff as last week (except for the discount code at the end). You can probably skip it if you're caught up.
format
As a reminder, there are numerous ways to keep up with the reading group:
- newsletter: I send updates on Mondays and Thursdays. In the Monday updates, I'll point to what to read; in the Thursday updates, I'll send some reflections and an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat.
- video chats: Thursdays at 8pm ET we have a video chat on jitsi1 where we talk about that week's readings.
- group chat: if you want to chat with people on signal, we have a pretty active group chat. You can join the signal group chat here.
schedule
Here's my tentative schedule for the book. I'm not including the additional readings, but I'm thinking about ways to archive what we read each week - it just doesn't fit well in a table sent via email. If you have suggestions (the signal chat has a Zotero3, if you want to join).
| Week of... | Reading... |
|---|---|
| April 27 | Preface |
| May 4 | ch1: "AI's Eugenic Legacies, Our Disabled Future" |
| May 11 | ch2: "A Taxonomy of AI" |
| May 18 | ch3: "The Broken Promises of AI in Everyday Life" |
| May 25 | ch4: "Social Stratification Engines and the Ideology of Replacement" |
| June 1 | ch5: "A Just AI Toolkit" |
next book
After Disabling Intelligences, let's read Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser.
I figure we'll be getting started on June 8 or maybe June 15, so you'll probably want to get it ASAP. You can follow the link above, or find it at various online and brick & mortar bookstores.
I have ideas for what we'll read after Techno-Negative, but if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
last thoughts
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, etc... please feel free to reach out. Talk soon.
Also, if you come across something you think we'd like to read, I'd love to hear about it; contact me.
Okay, that's it; see you Thursday to discuss the chapter and other reading.
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I use Jitsi for video chats. Jitsi is a free web-based video chat service kind of like Zoom, but it's free, absent of generative AI stuff, and not connected to people's work accounts. ↩
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If you've made (written, recorded, etc...) something you'd like to share - a zine, an blog post, an academic paper, a video, or whatever else - email me or message me on signal. ↩
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Zotero is a free, open-source resource management software. Sometimes people use it to keep track of papers and other resources they want to cite in their writing; in our case, it's serving as a place where articles, papers, books, podcasts, etc... that come up in conversations in signal, video chats, emails, etc... can be saved. ↩