In 2026, there is consensus among the 38 public AAU universities that AI will provide a social benefit. That provision is often expressed as conditional, of course, on the important role of the university. But AI social benefit will arrive, and the university must invest in that future. I could argue there is little evidence…
Keep readingLast month, I wrote about “context laundering” in AI summarization. Over the last few weeks, this issue has taken on some new dimensions. In June, TIME began delivering Markdown versions of their website. This was done in response to the increase in bots and agents in scraping their website and is part of their larger,…
Keep readingFrontier AI’s value proposition relies on our accepting the AI operation of inference as reasoning itself. For frontier AI’s success, inference cannot be simply a proxy for judgement; computational inference must become a judgment machine. The slippage occurs when an inferential output is treated as a judgment, especially when that judgment organizes or directly initiates…
Keep readingAmidst the talk of AI bubbles, perhaps you’ve encountered the concept of the Jevons Effect. Jevons’ argument has to do with coal, hence the title of his work, The Coal Question. The principle is that an increased efficiency in the use of a resource (e.g., coal) might result in an expanded consumption of that resource.…
Keep readingThe 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,…
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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 