Dan McQuillan
Critical Computing Scholar
Goldsmiths lecturer in creative and social computing whose 2022 book “Resisting AI” argues that AI should not be reformed but refused — a technology that, in its current arrangement, tilts society toward austerity and authoritarianism.
In his words
This book is about how and why we should resist the introduction of artificial intelligence.
AI is in fact what I label as a necropolitical technology, one that is going to lead to people unnecessarily dying.
Biography
Dan McQuillan is a lecturer in creative and social computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a former physicist and human-rights technologist. He is one of the few academics who does not merely critique AI’s harms but argues, flatly, that the technology as currently built should be resisted rather than improved.
An anti-fascist approach to AI
His 2022 book “Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence” (Bristol University Press) contends that machine learning is a continuation of bureaucratic discrimination — a system whose statistical optimisation naturally amplifies austerity, border violence and social sorting. McQuillan is careful to say AI is not inherently fascist, but that it “lends itself to fascization” under present political and economic conditions.
What we need to solve the problems of AI is not more AI. We need collectivities with a techno-political perspective.
Rather than corporate ethics boards, McQuillan proposes “people’s councils” and workers’ assemblies to decide whether a given AI system should exist at all, and has called for a halt to hyperscale data-centre construction. His work is a touchstone for the degrowth and refusal wing of AI criticism, downstream of the harm-focused scholarship of Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender but pushing further toward outright abolition.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/dan-mcquillan