AI Skeptics - Resisting AI (week 2)
Hello, hope you're all doing well on this holiday (MLK Jr. Day, in the US).
Last week we read the introduction of Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan; this week we'll begin the book in earnest with Chapter 1.
If you don't have the book yet, you should order it now.
This week I'm reading the following:
- Resisting AI, Chapter 1: "Operations of AI"
- "Introducing beginners to the mechanics of machine learning" by Miriam Posner
(You don't have to read everything on Dr. Posner's blog post; I'm just going to pick one or two things and watch or read it)
If you want a look at what my schedule, that's at the end of this email.
format
I want to briefly remind you of the format for the reading group, in case you're just joining:
- 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 an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat later that day.
- video chats: Thursdays at 8pm (ET) we have a video chat1 where we talk about that week's readings. Sometimes we'll have a guest to talk about something related to what we read that week.
- 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.
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. Please contact me.
Okay, that's it; see you Thursday to discuss the chapter and other reading.
appendix
You don't need to read this stuff if you don't want to.
schedule
This should be a reasonably accurate roadmap of what we did (or will) read:
| CHAPTER | OTHER READING | VIDEO CHAT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction | "Against AI" | Jan 12 | Jan 15 |
| Operations of AI | Jan 19 | Jan 22 | |
| Collateral Damage | Jan 26 | Jan 29 | |
| AI Violence | Feb 2 | Feb 5 | |
| Necropolitics | Feb 9 | Feb 12 | |
| Post-machine Learning | Feb 16 | Feb 19 | |
| People's Councils | Feb 23 | Feb 26 | |
| Anti-facist AI | Mar 2 | Mar 5 | |
| ... | |||
| Why We Fear AI | Mar 9 | ||
| ... | |||
| Disabling Intelligences | Apr 20 | ||
next books
Our next book will be Why We Fear AI by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer.
After that, we'll read Disabling Intelligences by Rua Williams.
We'll probably start Why We Fear AI in March (and very tentatively that means we'll start Disabling Intelligences in mid-April), so make plans to order those books accordingly.
-
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. ↩
-
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. ↩