The basic criti-hype concern in AI nationalism lies in slippages that occur in where the nationalism lies. If we want to argue that the US needs its own AI, for example, then what does that imply about the “always already” ideological process/content of AI? In turn, what does that say about the knowledge produced with…
Keep readingThe generic pedagogical tools of any LMS (discussions, quizzes, etc.) are generally “free to use” elsewhere on the web. The feature set, while necessary in an LMS, is not where the commercial value lies. The value-added of the LMS is that it provides a digital enclosure that demonstrates a university’s due diligence in privacy protection,…
Keep readingThe NY Times reports today “U.S. Workers Are More Productive Than Ever. A.I. Isn’t the Key. Companies have been getting more out of employees for several years.” Golf clap for companies. What does it mean to “get more out our employees”? The American mythology is that increased productivity makes everyone’s life better, but this apparent…
Keep readingThe bubble doesn’t have to be that bad to bring financial and reputational damage to the AI Forward university. All that really has to happen is that decreased confidence in investment in Frontier AI destabilizes the value proposition of investing in the AI Forward university. The financial damage will be obvious in all the money…
Keep readingThis research suggests that AI remains dependent on human evaluation as a filter. While our digital experiences are algorithmic, aside from AI slop, the content of the internet is human filtered in the sense that we made it. It is also filtered post-hoc in many human ways. There are moderators on Reddit, Wikipedia, and so…
Keep readingIn turn, if AI companies are charging by the token then they have a different market incentive. Verbose responses chew through tokens. The overuse of automation in workflow as when someone prompts a bot to turn a folder of files into a slide deck summary of those files. Reasoning inflation, when users select an over-powered…
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My academic career has roughly corresponded with the rise of the internet, and the developments of networked digital media have been the focus of my research for the last 30 years. I have investigated the role intelligent machines play in the ways we communicate, the communities we form, and our engagement with larger world.
My current research (book) project is tentatively titled Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My most recent open access publication is “Living on Digital Flatlands: Assemblies of Computer Vision.” Here’s the abstract.
This article explores computer vision not only in terms of its use with “intelligent” machines, such as autonomous vehicles, but also more broadly in terms of quotidian, digitally-mediated human vision, such as that experienced through smartphones. Drawing on assemblage theory and radical media archeology, I describe the technological processes that link together materially different spatiotemporal assemblages to produce a posthuman condition of computer vision typified by what Wolfgang Ernst terms the “epistemogenic momentum” of “techno-mathematical configurations.” Manuel DeLanda’s flat ontologies prove useful here for describing how assemblages operating in different space-times interact. I then turn to Deleuze and Guatarri’s techno-semiological stratum, specifically their discussion of the stratum’s spatiotemporal superlinearity, to articulate an emerging digital-calculative layer. I argue that understanding computer vision assemblages requires more than setting technical descriptions alongside cultural-ideological critique; it also requires an integrated analysis of the roles digital nonhumans perform in the production of a new visual regime with new capacities and desires. The shared human-nonhuman capacity of computer vision moves sight from the biological and linguistic assemblages of humans into digital assemblages where vision becomes calculable and subject to algorithmic modifications. The results are not only digitally-composed, screened images, but also new means of production, organization, and identity.
Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 