What kind of worlds is AI designing? And who is behind this project? AI is often presented as a neutral and inevitable technological breakthrough and an efficient tool capable of solving some of society’s challenges through automation. But AI is built through huge infrastructures of data extraction, human labour, and natural resource consumption.

In this seminar, we will examine AI as a designed sociotechnical project that shapes how societies are organised and how futures are imagined. We will explore what AI is and how it works, meaning how AI systems are trained, how data is collected and classified, and how algorithmic biases can reproduce and amplify existing social inequalities. We will also investigate the more-than-human systems that make it possible, from the invisible labour of data workers and content moderators to the environmental costs of data centres and resource extraction. Throughout it all, we will ask who profits from it and whose values become embedded in its design. For this, we will engage with the ideological foundations of contemporary AI development, including Silicon Valley culture, techno-solutionism, transhumanism, and emerging forms of technofascist thought. And, most importantly, how we might design alternative presents and futures.

Departing from an ontological perspective of design, this seminar will unpack these tensions by drawing from decolonial theory, feminist thought and the critical posthumanities. We will not see AI literacy as a skill for design (i.e., how to design with AI). The aim of the seminar is to develop a critical understanding of AI to unpack how AI itself is designed, how it designs worlds in turn, and how those worlds might be imagined and designed otherwise.

Methodology

• Reading, reflecting, and discussing: we will engage in weekly readings, critical reflections, and collective discussions that question the relationships between technology, power, and design.
• Guest lecturers and explorations: we will connect theory with real-world practice and activism through conversations with researchers and practitioners working on the social, political, and environmental dimensions of AI.
• Research and writing: your final assignment will be a research-based essay where you will apply the theories from the seminar to critically analyse an aspect of AI and imagine how it could be designed otherwise.

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