This is a transcript of a presentation I gave on campus today. Thanks for the Critical AI Studies humanities research group for inviting me to speak. Some UB folks mentioned they couldn’t make it. My work has investigated how nonhuman actors, particularly media technologies, participate in our rhetorical practices. Frontier AI represents a significant new…
Keep readingOne of the more persistent modern promises of education is that students should become more capable and adaptable humans. That said, we are familiar with how those terms are shaped by social, economic, and institutional conditions. Certainly this has been the case with the impact on higher education not only of AI as a technology…
Keep readingIn January 2024, Governor Hochul announced the Empire AI project as a consortium of public and private NY universities, state funds, and corporate partners. Fundamentally, Empire AI is a planned 15MW data center that is being built on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus. That data center will be located on a service road on…
Keep readingThe decision to trial Flock Security cameras on campus materially intersects with the university’s claims to pursue AI for social good. UB’s central university and decanal websites, along with its “AI and Society” department, clearly represent the institution’s public position on AI.
In short, the message is consistent: we do AI for good. UB…
Keep readingThe rhetoric of the higher education industry regarding artificial intelligence operates by the following premises. AI will transform society on a consequential scale. Universities must adapt to substantial social change. Universities have a responsibility for the public good. Universities must respond to AI by participating in its development, infrastructure, and governance. Therefore universities must transform…
Keep readingAt the start of the academic year, some version of “students these days” often arises. This time it is in the form of AI cheating. There have been a few recently published reports on this matter. In Science, “Generative AI use and misuse call for assessment reform in higher education” (Chirikov, Smirnov, and Kzilcec) looked…
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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.
