Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Instead of helping to address our current crises, AI causes divisions that limit people’s life chances, and even suggests fascistic solutions to social problems. In this event, Dan McQuillan will discuss his analysis of AI’s deep learning technology and its political effects and traces the ways that it resonates with contemporary political and social currents, from global austerity to the rise of the far right.

Dan McQuillan calls for us to resist A.I. as we know it and restructure it by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimization. He sets out an anti-fascist approach to AI that replaces exclusions with caring, proposes people’s councils as a way to restructure AI through mutual aid and outlines new mechanisms that would adapt to changing times by supporting collective freedom.

Academically rigorous, yet accessible to a socially engaged readership, McQuillan's book will be of interest to all who wish to challenge the social logic of AI by reasserting the importance of the common good.

About the Speaker:

Dan McQuillan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from Imperial College, London. After his PhD, Dan worked with people learning disabilities & mental health issues, created websites with asylum seekers, ran social innovation camps in Georgia, Armenia & Kyrgyzstan, led a citizen science project in Kosova, and worked in digital roles in both Amnesty International and the NHS. His book Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence was published in 2022.

The Moderator:

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is a British-Mexican philosopher, researcher and artist. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has published widely in the fields of philosophy and social and political theory, as well as carrying out socially engaged research projects and collaborations. He is author of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (2024) and editor of Marx and the Critique of Humanism (Bloosmsbury, forthcoming 2025).

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This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. It is open to the public and held on Zoom. The event is free to attend but the Zoom registration page has, by default, an optional donation amount that you can change to zero (or whatever you wish). Donations go to The Philosopher magazine to cover our costs and expand the scope of the series.

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.