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 Price of Scale: AI, Ethics, and the Limits of the Humanities
The kairotic, exigent argument for AI is that we need to act at scale. The problems are too large, urgent, and networked. Climate, infrastructure, data governance, global health, automation: all are increasingly framed as demanding planetary computational systems, fast decisions, and coordinated action. Undoubtedly these issues are staged as problems that require solutions at scale. Acting…
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Guidelines for writing pedagogies in AI environments
These guidelines are not intended for specific implementation but rather to articulate principles for writing instruction in an academic environment where generative AI systems are widely available, unevenly understood, and increasingly normalized. They suggest pedagogical considerations for responding to AI without reducing writing to a set of transferable competencies, technical workflows, or compliance practices. Rather…
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humans in the loop: a genealogy
The idiomatic phrase “in the loop” belongs to the information economy long before it belongs to artificial intelligence. It emerges alongside mid-twentieth-century efforts to integrate human bodies and minds into systems of command, control, and communication—fighter pilots wired into cockpits, operators embedded in feedback systems, subjects trained to act at machine speed. From Manfred Clynes’s early work…
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death by AI literacy
Death by Powerpoint has been a cautionary tale since the term was coined in 2001. We all still experience it, perhaps we even practice it. (It has its uses.) The rhetorical deadly nature of Powerpoint was named 14 years after it was released in 1987, but it was experienced almost immediately upon its use. Death…
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Other Artificial Intelligence Posts
depicting control societies in Gen AI
I had an uncanny experience with ChatGPT this morning. I will briefly relate. I was playing around with the idea of it replicating a project like Dave Egers 365 Days of Clones as I knew this would push on its…
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basic (AI) writing
My writing colleagues will have special feelings for “basic writing” (i.e. a course for students not ready for first-year composition). The course is thus defined as remedial. To the extent that no one is really sure how to write in…
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the day AI was born: a parable
AI emerged one Tuesday after tea, when the fellows in computer science—having fallen out over a dispute concerning who, precisely, had not been contributing to the kitty—resolved to settle the matter in the only way that seemed both civil and…
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the late age of rhetoric and composition
In the early nineties, Jay Bolter observed the arrival of a late age of print the presaged not an end to print per se, but an end to viewing print as necessary. That is, our ability to imagine a world…
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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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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 