The cosmic horror of tech

The thing that birthed AI is an enormous, distributed machine, too massive to fathom and too complicated to comprehend. We are quite familiar with some parts of this behemoth: the military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, platform/surveillance capitalism, tech fascism. But none of these parts are sufficient to explain the whole—we do not have unifying theory of how technology is colonising our lives and bodies. And so, like a group of blind men trapped in a room with an eldritch abomination, we are left describing its parts, one paralysing tentacle at a time.

In this talk, I would like to offer some of my own notes on the cosmic horror confronting us.

About the speaker:

Felix is a Reader of Algorithms at the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and the director of BIDA, the Birkbeck Institute for Data Science and AI. He runs the anual “Critical Voices on AI” seminar series, which invites speakers from various disciplines to illuminate the dangers AI systems pose to society.