ART-AI Seminar
We were very pleased to have Petter Ericson, a Staff Scientist from Umeå University (ART-AI academic partner), join us for this ART-AI seminar entitled ‘Anti-capitalist AI’ on the 11th February 2025.
Many thanks to Petter Ericson for speaking and Jack McKinlay for chairing.
The recording of this seminar is now available below along with an abstract and bio. (Apologies the first 5 minutes did not record)
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence has been explicitly tied to both fascism and capitalism in recent research, both in terms of its current mode of development and research, the affordances yielded by its most visible products, its historical ties to the US military-industrial complex, and current ones to major tech corporations and ‘elite’ institutions.
The inherent drives of capital and capitalism towards infinite, exponential growth (which is intimately connected in the current economy to similarly ever-increasing resource and energy use) are incompatible with a sustainable society. As such, an important question to ask is “what would constitute an anti-capitalist approach to artificial intelligence?”. How can researchers, policymakers, developers, workers, and the public understand, analyse, approach, use, and reject “AI” in order to achieve a better, more equal, and more sustainable society and ecology?
Already, a multitude emerging answers to these questions have been proposed, with a variety of foci, levels of direct political engagement, areas of action, and procedural and technical specificity, though there is as of yet a lack of coordination and unity into a shared political project or research agenda. I argue that taking an explicitly anti-capitalist stance is a necessary (though not sufficient) component in any such movement, and that a clear-eyed recognition of class conflict should be part of analyses and proposals that seek equitable, democratic, and sustainable use of AI.
Bio
Petter Ericson is a Staff Scientist affiliated with the Department for Computing Science at Umeå University. His research interests range from formal descriptions of structured data to how such data is used in practice to enact, enforce and embody political and value judgements, as well as the interactions between different technologies and their surrounding political economy. A recent research focus has been on how new technological landscapes manifest in new and old conflicts around the making of art (especially music), and how AI companies’ claims of ‘democratizing artmaking’ bear out in practice.
