How to be a human being in times of crisis
Effective and pervasive abstraction boundaries: that is how we make computers and get them to do complex things. […] Being able to pick up or craft new abstraction boundaries is a valuable skill. Yet there is an attendant cost. It can easily become your primary way of thinking—and not just in technical realms. Like all ways of thinking, it can drive out other ways of thinking. If abstraction-partitioning is the wrong way to go in some domain then your training in CS isn’t going to help you. It might hinder you instead. For questions of significant social, ethical, or environmental importance, good abstraction boundaries don’t exist. It’s not the right way to think about. An effectively style of thinking in one problem domain can be worthless, or worse than worthless, in another.
Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing? · BG | berlinergazette.de
Because they are based on centralization and abstraction, our current sociopolitical structures are susceptible to being replaced by AI.
Resisting GenAI & Big Tech in Higher Education
I suggest we situate our resistance to AI inside and outside higher education as forms of decomputing. Decomputing rejects scale because that drives carbon emissions, but also because our agency is undermined by our immersion in a system of machinic relations, which includes the contemporary university Decomputing is based on the principles of degrowth, care and conviviality. We need systems that don’t depend on continuous expansion, whether that’s AI, universities or entire economies. We need to start from care to counter algorithmic detachment and eugenicist abstractions. Conviviality gives us ways to collectively assess tech’s effects on relatedness and bio-interaction. Wherever AI is proposed as ‘the answer’ there’s already a structural problem. One that’s best addressed through the direct social relations of those most affected.