AI Skeptics - Resisting AI (week 3)
Hi everyone.
If you don't have Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan yet, you should order it now. If you're worried you won't have time to catch up, that's okay; at the end of this email is a section titled "next books", where I've outlined some of the books I have planned. You can order the books so you're ready to go when we move on to our next book.
Last week we read and discussed chapter 1 of Resisting AI ("Operations of AI"). This week I'm reading:
- Resisting AI, Chapter 2: "Collateral Damage"
- "Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library" by Kailyn "Kay" Slater
We're revisiting the reading we were going to discuss a few weeks ago so that we can hopefully talk with the author (Kay Slater) this Thursday on video chat.
If you want a look at what my schedule, that's at the end of this email.
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 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.
closing things
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, it's just here if you need it.
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 | "Against AI" (for real this time) |
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 start Why We Fear AI in March (and, tentatively, that means we'll start Disabling Intelligences in mid-April), so make plans to order those books accordingly.
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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. ↩