Last year at AWE, I participated on a Socratic Dialogue about the Future of AI and XR along with Leslie Shannon, Alvin Graylin, and Louis Rosenberg. Shannon and Graylin argued for AI, and Rosenberg and I argued against AI. The format proved to be really popular, and so they brought us back again for AWE 2026. It was another dynamic conversation, and this year it often felt like I was the only arguing against unsubstantiated AI Hype, but also warning about the tendency for AI to consolidate wealth and power, which is especially problematic within a democratically-backsliding political context. But we don’t have any privacy protections or anything resembling the EU’s AI Act, which would curb the various automated decision-making applications that have a high likelihood of violating human rights due to AI errors.
- The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (see episode #1563)
- Dr. Jonnie Penn’s “Inventing Intelligence: On the History of Complex Information Processing and Artificial Intelligence in the United States in the Mid-Twentieth Century” Ph.D. Dissertation
- “Privacy in Authoritarian Times: Surveillance Capitalism and Government Surveillance” by Daniel Solove
- My “Privacy Pitfalls of Contextually-Aware AI: Sensemaking Frameworks for Context and XR Data Qualities” paper by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s Existing Law and Extended Reality: An Edited Volume of the 2023 Symposium Proceedings
- Coded Bias documentary
- Ghost in the Machine documentary
- “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” by Bender et al.
- An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuillan
- The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies by Jonathan Roberge & Michael Castelle
- Reporting from Ed Zitron on “AI’s Brokenomics” where a $200 OpenAI or Anthropic subscription could be costing them up to $8,000 or $14,000 respectively. And see his recent appearance on CNBC providing the Bear case for Hyperscaler AI companies who don’t have profitability in sight.
- There’s a growing backlash against Techno-feudal Billionaires and Trillionaires who are using AI to consolidate their wealth and power. See this culture jamming video of resistance as well as Mo Bitar‘s videos.
[NOTE: I’ll add some more notes here as well as some other links from Alvin and Louis]
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