I do feel that AI is, in many ways, actually, a response to a general context of collapse.

I think the optimizations of AI, as it manifests socially and economically, are actually

pretty well suited to a sort of neoliberal status quo, because that is about very much

about a sort of reductive, isolating essentialism, you know, in which things can be

optimized. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week's guest is Dan McQuillan.

Dan is a lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London and the author of Resisting AI.

There is growing discussion about the harms and the drawbacks of social media,

of the amount of time that we spend on screens, and certainly of the generative AI tools that

are proliferating through our lives, especially in the past few years, and how we are going

to respond to all these things. We know that there are costs that have come of the way that these digital

technologies have transformed our lives, in particular the way that these companies have sought

to implement them in workplaces to suppress the rights of workers, certainly in government

to reduce access to public services or make them more discriminatory through the argument of

efficiency? And that's not to mention the environmental costs that have come of all of this,

especially as we're seeing these generative AI tools proliferate despite the amount of

computation that they require. And so the question is not just how are these technologies

transforming our society and how would we

potentially use less of them, but what is a different way of understanding these technologies

and of thinking of a politics that would change our society for the better while reducing

our dependence on these computationally intensive tools that seek to capture our attention and make us dependent on

them. And so that's part of the reason why I wanted to have Dan on the show today, because he has

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