My current research (book) project is (working title) Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My work on this site that is most related to that project is collected here.
Empire, AI & Society
the phenomenology of ai
Me: There is a well-known composition essay titled “the phenomenology of error” about how instructors are primed to see error in student work. I think an analogous phenomenology of AI could be written now. Of course student work looks like AI generated student essays. The whole point is to teach students to produce predictable prose…
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we have never been writers (the patient zero of academic dishonesty)
This understanding is as familiar as Plato. We didn’t need to wait for Foucault or Barthes or Derrida to recognize the category error in conflating writing with thinking. Until the printing press, human hands (and thus human thought) participated in acts of inscription. Writing required human cognition to move the pen (or whatever) across the…
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The “AI plus Computer Science” degree
AI plus Computer Science is patient zero in the proliferation of AI plus degrees (e.g. AI and whatever). If you think that “AI and Computer Science” sounds like two versions of the same thing, then you are thinking the kinds of thoughts that terrify computer science departments. To be clear. Computer Science is a well-established…
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What is this AGI thing again?
5 years, 10 years, 50 years. Something is going to happen. We can all agree that we now have AI, but when will it get its promotion to General? And what is it that it isn’t what we have now? Is it just going to be faster and stronger, like the Six Million Dollar Man?…
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Other Artificial Intelligence Posts
slow your role: academic chronopolitics
Cutting to the chase, en media res, this is Virilio dromology recast through the predictive+enactive (or anticipatory) intelligence of contemporary AI-temporized culture. Jameson wrote about the shock of speed as an affect of Modernity. We get the “need for speed”…
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Ready, set… get ready for readiness: pedagogy, Anticipatory Intelligence and misery
I would frame our higher education situation as follows. We are readying students for future challenges but leaving them unprepared for a future worth inhabiting. This applies broadly but especially with our response to AI. This is not a failure…
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artificial documentation: truth = belief + time
Understandably the work of documentary filmmakers faces new epistemological challenges in the wake of generative AI. There’s a good read: “Can you believe the documentary you’re watching?” by NY Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson that provides great insight into this…
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AI pizza toppings and the humanities lover’s supreme
To follow on Jay Bolter, we might say we find ourselves in the late age of literacy. What replaces literacy as the medial-rhetorical substrate of academia? AI-generated literacy? With its feedback loop, AI generated literacy operates through the rectilinear, recursive…
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top-25 render ghost universities
James Bridle discusses render ghosts, at least that’s where I first encountered the term. Think of the people that are drawn into the worlds of architectural renderings as a baseline and then move out toward all the now AI-generated render…
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Imperial AI Recruitment and Training: Carpentry 101
By Ruotailfoglio – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link If you aren’t familiar with the Müller-Lyer illusion (wikipedia). This history of the illusion test is interesting as it incorporates issues of urbanism (“carpentered” environments) and race (of course). My sense…
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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 