Jathan Sadowski: A Ruthless Criticism of AI and Technology
In 2021, science fiction Ted Chiang writer observed that, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us.” The sudden boom of interest in artificial intelligence—driven by torrents of cash and threats to transform society from top to bottom—has clarified this relationship between technology and capitalism even further. People are more aware than ever of the power dynamics that drive systems like AI. It is now common to see skeptical inquiry about how technologies are made, who decides their purpose, who uses them, and who are they used against? The impacts of AI are no longer merely abstract or distant concerns. The ecological, economic, and human costs are increasingly material and immediate. By expanding on Chiang’s sharp remarks about our anxieties of how capital forges technologies to then wield against us, this talk outlines three key concepts that are crucial for a political economic analysis—and a ruthless criticism—of AI and capitalism. First is innovation realism. Second is cheap data. Third is the perpetual value machine.
Dr Emma Tseris: The proliferation of trauma across the human services: Unpacking a ‘progressive’ concept.
Trauma-informed practices are proliferating in social work, and across the human services more broadly. Such practices are usually positioned as unproblematically positive and progressive, and they have been commended for offering a shift away from pathologising approaches. However, there is growing critical scholarship highlighting the limitations of trauma-informed practices in enacting social justice, instead illuminating the symptom-oriented and individual-focused discourses that permeate trauma-informed practices, and an increasingly amorphous understanding of the meaning of trauma-informed practice. This sits alongside a limited critical interrogation of the rise of neuro-centric perspectives that seek to predict the impacts of violence across the lifecourse. In this paper, I will argue that trauma-informed practices have become a popular approach to demonstrating a rhetorical engagement with ‘social justice’, while reinstating the professional power and expertise of psy-professionals. This is achieved by constructing victim-survivors of violence as ‘risky’ and ‘dysfunctional’, which justifies a range of oppressive practices, including paternalism, surveillance, and diverse forms of coercion. Such practices are wrapped up in notions of benevolence, leaving little room for critique. Consequently, there is an urgent need to consider whether the feminist and activist roots of the trauma paradigm can be re-discovered, or whether it is necessary to take a different direction in addressing and preventing interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence.
