Politechs

Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, lays out a vision for an alternative model of technology that serves the people, rather than the shareholders of a handful of US tech companies. We talk about how the Trump regime's overreach (unpredictable foreign trade policies, kidnapping the leader of a sovereign state, escalating support for the Zionist entity's genocide in Gaza, an unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, including the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, his family, and other high-ranking officials of the Iranian government) has presented us with a unique opportunity for an internationalist response that rejects US tech and builds a new technical stack in service of the public good.Mentioned in this episode:Road to Nowhere - book by Paris Marx [permalink]Hyperscale - book by Paris Marx [permalink]Tech Won't Save Us - podcast by Paris MarxDisconnect - newsletter by Paris MarxLudicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors - book by Ed Niedermeyer  [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more!We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

At the beginning of the season, we felt we had a pretty good handle on HELLISH AI: a Hyper-scaled Expansive Large Language model which is Imperial, Sucks up all the electricity and water, and causes Human suffering. We wondered whether a different way was possible, a HEAVENLY AI that is High quality, with Ethical curation of data, Accesible to individuals and smaller organisations, Viable, Environmentally sustainable, with Narrowly focused applications, using a Language model, that fit with the true spirit of YOLO: since you only live once, you might as well live well.In this conversation, we apply what we've learned from our guests this season to try and answer that question.Mentioned in this episode:I Am An AI Hater - essay by Anthony Moser [permalink]A Butlerian Hauntology - paper by Dr. Syed Mustafa AliEmpire of AI - book by Karen HaoBritish Post Office scandal - article about wrongful prosecution of British Post Office workersLibrary Freedom Project - a network of values-driven librarians working together to build information democracy [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more!We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Friend of the show Dr. Chris Gilliard returns to catch us up on what's been happening in the world of surveillance since last time we talked. From Ring-powered "pet finder" systems to Meta/Rayban-wearing Glassholes to Anthropic's performative handwringing over their Department of War contract, it's not very encouraging out there. You might be able to guess what Chris thinks about the question of whether any of this technology can be redeemed.Mentioned in this episode:On the Impossibility of Ethical Surveillance - essay by Torin MonahanFacial Recognition is the Plutonium of AI - paper by Luke Stark [PDF] Cute videos, but little evidence: Police say Amazon Ring isn't much of a crime fighter - article by Cyrus Farivar [permalink]Careless People - book by Sarah Wynne-WilliamsThe TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence - paper by Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more!We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Dr. Dan McQuillan, Senior Lecturer in Critical AI at Goldsmiths, University of London, defines Decomputing as "a 50:50 hybrid of decolonial and degrowth approaches." He joins us to unpack that further and pick up on some of the themes from his prescient book from June of 2022, "Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence", which came out a mere four and a half months before OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world.Mentioned in this episode:Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence - book by Dan McQuillan [permalink]Tools for Conviviality - book by Ivan Illichdanmcquillan.org - Dan McQuillan's blog [permalink]We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Josh and Ray are joined by computational linguist Dr. Emily M. Bender to discuss what "AI" really is, and why the slippery nature of the term is very much intentional. We look at the eugenicist history of the quest to define and measure human intelligence and try to understand what the project of "artificial intelligence" is, then explore LLMs as synthetic text extruding machines and automation technology, as opposed to a machine god on the cusp of being born.Mentioned in this episode:Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 - podcast by Drs. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna [permalink]THE AI CON - How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want - book by Drs. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna  [permalink]On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 - paper by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. [permalink]Ghost in the Machine - film by Valerie Veatch [permalink]The TESCREAL Bundle - paper by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more!We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

In order to answer the question of whether we still need libraries when we have chatbots, we're joined by Alison Macrina, founder and Executive Director of Library Freedom Project, and Kay Slater, member of LFP and library worker in Chicago. Alison and Kay dispel some myths, talk about how libraries have changed with technology, how libraries are funded, how library workers have a central role to play in resisting AI, and how members of the public like us and our listeners can support libraries.Mentioned in this episode:Library Freedom Project Resources - Posters, bookmarks, presentations, and more resources to help with teaching and promoting information democracy, privacy, and intellectual freedom. [permalink]Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves - paper by Fobazi Ettarh [permalink]Libraries for the People - a leftist library project [permalink]We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Nate Madson Dion, a fifth grade math teacher from Aurora, Colorado, schools Josh and Ray on how technology has crept into primary schools, how the inevitability narrative manifests with teachers and administrators, and how he has found effective ways to resist, both through one on one conversations with fellow educators, but also around the bargaining table for his union's contract. Nate puts out a call for parents to contact their local school boards, find out how AI is being deployed in their children's schools, and more importantly, how to opt out of it.Mentioned in this episode:Bullshit Jobs - book by David GraeberParents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out. - article in Wired [permalink]How to engage in pseudoscience with real data: A criticism of John Hattie’s arguments in Visible Learning from the perspective of a statistician - article in the McGill Journal of Education [permalink]Writing vs AI - article by Cory Doctorow [permalink]Politechs Season 1 Episode 6 - Programmers - Josh and Ray talk about how to talk to programmers about AI.See the transcript footnotes for more!We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Software engineer and reluctant activist Radhika talks about epistemic violence, identity, immutability, the Enlightenment, common law, and many other things besides to illustrate just one of the ways in which trans people's lives are under attack. We discuss how AI affects trans people, and what it would take to be able to deploy machine learning technologies to improve their lives rather than oppress them, then end on a call to action for technologists.Mentioned in this episode:The Racial Contract - book by Charles MillsThe Sexual Contract - book by Carol PatemanAbsurd Trolley Problems - a set of increasingly ridiculous trolley problemsWe'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

Tech journalist Karen Hao joins us to discuss her book, "Empire of AI". Karen explains why she believes that the Silicon Valley hyper-scaled LLM flavour of AI is an imperial technology, and has become even more explicitly imperial in the 12 months since the book first came out as it is being more and more incorporated in the US military's wars. The paperback edition of the book has just been released in the US and UK, so if you live in either of those places and haven't read the book yet, be sure to pick it up!Mentioned in this episode:Empire of AI - book by Karen HaoEmpire of AI - UK paperbackEmpire of AI - US paperbackMystery AI Hype Theater 3000 - podcast by Emily M. Bender and Alex HannaMicrosoft's Hypocrisy on AI - article by Karen Hao [permalink]See the transcript footnotes for more!We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence

We welcome our favourite political scientist, Dr. Anna Colom, back on the show to dive into democracy: what is it really, how does AI threaten it, and how can it be built for real? Anna is a researcher with The Data Tank, a "think and do tank"; they work with people, organisations and institutions around the world to unlock data's potential: gathering, accessing, and reusing it responsibly, so we’re all better equipped to tackle the pressing issues of our time.Mentioned in this episode:The Sciences of the Democracies - book by Jean-Paul Gagnon and Benjamin Abrams [permalink]The Tech Coup - book by Marietje Schaake [permalink]Polis - an open-source platform that helps entire cities, states, or even countries find common ground on complex issues [permalink]We'd love to hear from you if you disagree with something we've said. Please read our rules of engagement for good faith discussions, and then send an email to [email protected] or hit us up on socials.To view full show notes, including transcripts, please visit the episode page. Be sure to follow us on BlueSky and Mastodon!Cover art by Anya K. Jordan @anyakjordan.bsky.socialTheme music by XyliaPolitechs is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence