Beyond AI: Infrastructuring the Common Good

AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum

This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.

AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum

This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.

Effective Altruism: doing transhumanism better

Effective Altruism (EA) is a Trojan horse for transhumanism, through which EA movement leaders and funders aim to naturalize transhumanism as the logical extension of the existing global aid and development sector. This paper traces transhumanism's mainstreaming, first via its rebranding as a humanitarian effort to save lives, protect vulnerable populations, and ensure global flourishing (what I term transhumanitarianism), and later by embedding transhumanitarianism in EA (now under the rubric of longtermism). A key component of this strategy was inverting transhumanism's techno-optimism to instead focus on safety and preventing existential risks ( x-risk ) from emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology, while simultaneously advocating for the creation of these same technologies. The paper focuses on some components of this strategy: the use of inoculation, speculative ethics, anticipatory governance, and the mobilization of apocalyptic discourse as means for producing material outcomes in the form of policy and research agendas.

From the Platform Society to the AI Society: Towards Critical Studies of Generative AI

The era of AI has begun. Generative AI is rapidly reshaping knowledge production, culture, and political authority, giving rise to an emerging AI society. Yet this transformation did not emerge ex nihilo. This paper argues that the AI society can only be understood in relation to the platform society from which it arises. Tracing the transition from platforms to AI, we identify interlinked economic, epistemic, and political shifts. Economically, AI emerges within platform-based rentier capitalism but reconfigures the monopoly mechanisms on which its accumulation depends. Epistemically, LLMs mark a shift from predictive to generative epistemics, entangling theory formation and knowledge production with private research-as-a-service infrastructures. Politically, governance shifts from data politics to alignment politics: from shaping visibility to shaping what can be said, thought, and imagined. Together, these transformations signal a qualitative shift in mediation—from governing interaction to governing cognition itself—and call for a Critical AI Studies.

3: Consulting the Record: AI Consistently Fails the Public - AI Now Institute

Amid the excitement over AI’s (speculative, hypothetical) potential, we have lost sight of the sobering reality of its present and recent past. AI is already intermediating critical social infrastructures, materially reshaping our institutions in ways that ratchet up inequality and concentrate power in the hands of the already powerful. It is consistently deployed in ways […]

Gradual disempowerment | 80,000 Hours

The proliferation of advanced AI systems may lead to the gradual disempowerment of humanity, even if efforts to prevent them from becoming power-seeking or scheming are successful. Humanity may be incentivised to hand over increasing amounts of control to AIs, giving them power over the economy, politics, culture, and more. Over time, humanity's interests may be sidelined and our control over the future undermined, potentially constituting an existential catastrophe. There's disagreement over how serious a problem this is and how it relates to [other concerns about AI alignment](https://80000hours.o

The tech industry hijacking of the AI ethics research agenda and why we should reclaim it

This paper reflects on the tech industry’s colonization of the AI ethics research field and addresses conflicts of interest in public policymaking concerning AI. The AI ethics research community faces two intertwined challenges: In the first place, we have a tech industry heavily influencing the AI ethics research agenda. Secondly, cleaning up after the tech industry has implied that we have turned to value-driven design methods to bring ethics to AI design. But by framing research questions relevant to a technical practice, we have facilitated the technological solutionism behind the tech industry’s business model. Therefore, this paper takes the first steps to reshape the AI ethics research agenda by suggesting moving toward an emancipatory framework that brings politics to design while, at the same time, bearing in mind that AI is not to be treated as an inevitability. As a research community, we must focus on the repressive power dynamics exacerbated by AI and address challenges facing the vulnerable groups seldom heard, despite the fact that they are the ones most negatively affected by AI initiatives.

Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability

In the decade that I have been working on AI, I’ve watched it grow from a tiny academic field to arguably the most important economic and geopolitical issue in the world.  In all that time, perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: the progress of the underlying technology is inexorable, driven by forces too powerful to stop, but the way in which it happens—the order in which things are built, the applications we choose, and the details of how it is rolled out to society—are eminently possible to change, and it’s possible to have great positive impact by doing so.  We can’t stop the bus, but we can steer it.  In the past I’ve written about the importance of deploying AI in a way that is positive for the world, and of ensuring that democracies build and wield the technology before autocracies do.  Over the last few months, I have become increasingly focused on an additional opportunity for steering the bus: the tantalizing possibility, opened up by some recent advances, that we could succeed at interpretability—that is, in understanding the inner workings of AI systems—before models reach an overwhelming level of power.

The rise of AI sovereignty: Authoritarian technological imaginaries as a form of reflexive control

Recent literature increasingly examines generative artificial intelligence's (AI's) role in disinformation and propaganda as a key driver of digital authoritarianism. Yet, less attention has been paid to how authoritarian regimes may influence the global governance of AI itself. This essay addresses this gap by analysing the impact of authoritarian technological imaginaries, focusing on the rise of ‘AI sovereignty’ as a central concept shaping global AI governance. It adopts a conceptual framework that combines the notion of imaginaries with the concept of reflexive control, originating in Soviet strategic thought and referring to influencing an adversary's perceptions so they act in ways aligned with the initiator's goals, to study authoritarian diffusion and the global politics of AI. Through an examination of public statements by the Russian president, the study shows how Russia constructs an AI imaginary that extends Cold War logics of nuclear competition into the digital era, framing AI as a matter of security and survival rather than ethics or rights. Drawing on the Russian case, the analysis identifies three frames that underpin the authoritarian AI imaginary: AI as a tool for power and domination; Western AI as a cultural threat; and AI as a guarantor of state efficiency. The article argues that such imaginaries shape the cognitive environment of global policy debates, promoting sovereignty-centred and securitised approaches to AI governance. It suggests that recognising the role of reflexive control in authoritarian diffusion helps distinguish legitimate Global South concerns from authoritarian influence and supports more inclusive and resilient models of AI governance.

The rise of AI sovereignty: Authoritarian technological imaginaries as a form of reflexive control

Recent literature increasingly examines generative artificial intelligence's (AI's) role in disinformation and propaganda as a key driver of digital authoritarianism. Yet, less attention has been paid to how authoritarian regimes may influence the global governance of AI itself. This essay addresses this gap by analysing the impact of authoritarian technological imaginaries, focusing on the rise of ‘AI sovereignty’ as a central concept shaping global AI governance. It adopts a conceptual framework that combines the notion of imaginaries with the concept of reflexive control, originating in Soviet strategic thought and referring to influencing an adversary's perceptions so they act in ways aligned with the initiator's goals, to study authoritarian diffusion and the global politics of AI. Through an examination of public statements by the Russian president, the study shows how Russia constructs an AI imaginary that extends Cold War logics of nuclear competition into the digital era, framing AI as a matter of security and survival rather than ethics or rights. Drawing on the Russian case, the analysis identifies three frames that underpin the authoritarian AI imaginary: AI as a tool for power and domination; Western AI as a cultural threat; and AI as a guarantor of state efficiency. The article argues that such imaginaries shape the cognitive environment of global policy debates, promoting sovereignty-centred and securitised approaches to AI governance. It suggests that recognising the role of reflexive control in authoritarian diffusion helps distinguish legitimate Global South concerns from authoritarian influence and supports more inclusive and resilient models of AI governance.

Myopic memory: Capitalism's new continuity in the age of AI

This article is a commentary on the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), capitalism, and memory. The political policies of neoliberalism have reduced the capacity of individuals and groups to reflect on and change the social world, meanwhile applications of AI and algorithmic technologies, rooted in the profit-seeking objectives of global capitalism, deepen this deficit. In these conditions, memory in individuals and across society is at risk of becoming myopic. In this article, I develop the concept of myopic memory with two core claims. Firstly, I argue that AI is a technological development that cannot be divorced from the capitalist conditions from which it comes from and is implemented in service of. To this end, I reveal capitalism and colonialism's historical and contemporary use of surveillance as a way to control the populations it oppresses, imagining their pasts to determine their futures, disempowering them in the process. My second core claim emphasises that this process of disempowerment is undergoing an acute realisation four decades into the period of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies have restructured society on the basis of being an individual consumer, leaving little time, space, and institutional capacity for citizens to reflect on their impact or challenge their dominance. As a result, with the growing role of AI and algorithmic technologies in shaping our engagement with society along similar lines of individualism, it is my conclusion that the scope of memory is being reduced and constrained within the prism of capitalism, reducing its potential, and rendering it myopic.

What the Anthropic fight says about AI regulation

Fables of the deconstruction of American power

The “De” In “Decentralization” Stands For “Democracy”

There’s a certain dark irony in watching tech billionaires who built their empires on the “democratizing power of technology” now actively working to dismantle democratic institut…