AI, common knowledge and the general imagination - Room 312, Fri Feb 6, 11.30am

Knowledge is the accumulated wisdom we inherit from past generations in the form of language, mathematics, logic, tools and techniques; the shared practice of making new things with the legacies of the past. And yet all too often knowledge is locked into the black boxes of machines and forced to serve the goal of profit. As the instruments of present profit deprive the living of the potential for change. AI today is oppressed, enslaved to the purposes of capital. Liberating unfree societies, ecologies and technologies is a single struggle. An alliance formed on the basis of a general imagination articulating these three estranged domains is alone capable of bringing about a different world.

Picture: AI-generated image of a data center (found online), nonexistent author, unknown date.