The Politics Of The Artificial

Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens. One of the pioneers of design studies and still one of its most distinguished practitioners, Victor Margolin here offers a timely meditation on design and its study at the turn of the millennium and charts new directions for the future development of both fields. Divided into sections on the practice and study of design, the essays in The Politics of the Artificial cover such topics as design history, design research, design as a political tool, sustainable design, and the problems of design's relation to advanced technologies. Margolin also examines the work of key practitioners such as the matrix designer Ken Isaacs. Throughout the book Margolin demonstrates the underlying connections between the many ways of reflecting on and practicing design. He argues for the creation of an international, interdisciplinary field of design research and proposes a new ethical agenda for designers and researchers that encompasses the responsibility to users, the problems of sustainability, and the complicated questions of how to set boundaries for applying advanced technology to solve the problems of human life. Opinionated and erudite, Victor Margolin's The Politics of the Artificial breaks fresh ground in its call for a new approach to design research and practice. Designers, engineers, architects, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians will all benefit from its insights.

Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens. One of the pioneers of design studies and still one of its most distinguished practitioners, Victor Margolin here offers a timely meditation on design and its study at the turn of the millennium and charts new directions for the future development of both fields. Divided into sections on the practice and study of design, the essays in The Politics of the Artificial cover such topics as design history, design research, design as a political tool, sustainable design, and the problems of design's relation to advanced technologies. Margolin also examines the work of key practitioners such as the matrix designer Ken Isaacs. Throughout the book Margolin demonstrates the underlying connections between the many ways of reflecting on and practicing design. He argues for the creation of an international, interdisciplinary field of design research and proposes a new ethical agenda for designers and researchers that encompasses the responsibility to users, the problems of sustainability, and the complicated questions of how to set boundaries for applying advanced technology to solve the problems of human life. Opinionated and erudite, Victor Margolin's The Politics of the Artificial breaks fresh ground in its call for a new approach to design research and practice. Designers, engineers, architects, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians will all benefit from its insights.

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

AI has unparalleled transformative potential to reshape society, our economies and our working lives, but without legal scrutiny, international oversight and public debate, we are sleepwalking into a future written by algorithms which encode racist, sexist and classist biases into our daily lives &– an issue that requires systemic political and cultural change to productively address. Leading privacy expert Ivana Bartoletti exposes the reality of the AI revolution, from the low-paid workers who toil to train algorithms to recognise cancerous polyps, to the rise of techno-racism and techno-chauvinism and the symbiotic relationship between AI and right wing populism. An Artificial Revolution is an essential primer to understand the intersection of technology and geopolitical forces shaping the future of civilisation.• Endorsements confirmed from leading UK political figures including David Lammy MP, Yvette Cooper MP, Paul Mason, Frances O'Grady and Ayesha Hazarika• A primer for anyone who is interested to learn more about the relation between AI and ethics, data and privacy, corporate power, politics and tech• Ivana is a sought-after commentator who has appeared on flagship news programmes on the BBC, Sky and other major broadcasters as a privacy and AI ethics expert, who also speaks at conferences around the world on AI and privacy

Dramatic statements about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence for humanity abound, as an industry of experts claims that AI is poised to reshape nearly every sphere of life. Who profits from the idea that the age of AI has arrived? Why do ideas of AI’s transformative potential keep reappearing in social and political discourse, and how are they linked to broader political agendas? Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. He demonstrates that understandings of AI, as a field and a technology, have shifted dramatically over time based on the needs of its funders and the professional class that formed around it. From its origins in the Cold War military-industrial complex through its present-day Silicon Valley proselytizers and eager policy analysts, AI has never been simply a technical project enabled by larger data and better computing. Drawing on intimate familiarity with the field and its practices, Katz instead asks us to see how AI reinforces models of knowledge that assume white male superiority and an imperialist worldview. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force. Bringing together theories of whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a deep understanding of the history and practice of science and computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence have led to significant advances in science and medicine, but have also facilitated new forms of repression, policing and surveillance. AI policy has become without doubt a significant issue of global politics. The Global Politics of Artificial Intelligence tackles some of the issues linked to AI development and use, contributing to a better understanding of the global politics of AI. This is an area where enormous work still needs to be done, and the contributors to this volume provide significant input into this field of study, to policy makers, academics, and society at large. Each of the chapters in this volume works as freestanding contribution, and provides an accessible account of a particular issue linked to AI from a political perspective. Contributors to the volume come from many different areas of expertise, and of the world, and range from emergent to established authors.

After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?

Political issues people care about such as racism, climate change, and democracy take on new urgency and meaning in the light of technological developments such as AI. How can we talk about the politics of AI while moving beyond mere warnings and easy accusations? This is the first accessible introduction to the political challenges related to AI. Using political philosophy as a unique lens through which to explore key debates in the area, the book shows how various political issues are already impacted by emerging AI technologies: from justice and discrimination to democracy and surveillance. Revealing the inherently political nature of technology, it offers a rich conceptual toolbox that can guide efforts to deal with the challenges raised by what turns out to be not only artificial intelligence but also artificial power. This timely and original book will appeal to students and scholars in philosophy of technology and political philosophy, as well as tech developers, innovation leaders, policy makers, and anyone interested in the impact of technology on society.​