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
AI Ethics and Science Wars 2
In the 1990s, the “science wars” asked whether science was objective or culturally constructed. Today, AI ethics raises a different but related question: can ethical norms be operationalized as optimization targets and enforced through technical architecture? Alignment is not the same as ethical agency. Guardrails are not the same as deliberation. And product safety is…
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on the future of the teaching of writing
In ebr: electronic book review, Anna Mills, Jon Ippolito, Maha Bali, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Annette Vee, and Marc Watkins have published a series titled The Transformers: Imagining the Future of the Teaching of Writing. My title borrows from theirs. They raise two important and related questions for writing instructors: Certainly there are many…
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AI Agents and the Return of the Deodand
AI agents are the current shift in frontier AI. Much of the development has begun in coding environments, but it is not hard to imagine that by the time our current students graduate, corporations will routinely employ internal AI agents—and many individuals may use personal ones. What can these agents do? We are still at…
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AI’s non-ethical output
I’ve been working around this idea for a while as part of my book project, but I am starting to see more similar observations being made about AI output (i.e., what we encounter). Though perhaps we can find hints of this in earlier time-critical media, as those primarily replayed already inscribed media, putting them into…
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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 