AI and the Audacity of Hope
Patrisse Cullors and Avriel Epps dare to dream of AI optimism
Dr. Avriel Epps – newly minted Harvard Ph.d. whose thesis dissertation explores the “impacts of machine learning recommendations on adolescent identity in the age of #BlackLivesMatter” – is urging us to feel optimistic about the potential of AI. At present, Epps notes, most of our technologies are deployed around “supporting optimization and efficiency.” But what if we used tech to prioritize other values? What if AI could help us build new kinds of “scaffoldings that get us closer to the futures we imagine.”
“We” – the 40-or-so people gathered in the NorBlackNorWhite book-and-clothing store in Los Angeles – are here on a warm June evening to attend a workshop on “AI and Abolition” hosted by Dr. Epps and Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matters and author of An Abolitionist’s Handbook. In part the event is to promote Cullors book, now out in paperback, but the grander aim is to get us to start thinking about the role of AI in the context of “abolitionist thinking.” [1]
“Abolition,” Cullors tells us in her opening remarks, “isn’t just an idea”; we need to have conversations about practical means for bringing it about. Hence her handbook, whose subtitle is “12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.” If abolition “is about getting rid of systems” of oppression, Cullors stresses that abolitionists must equally be focused on building up new systems – which firstly will require new acts of imagining. “The most disappointing thing about Capitalism,” she tells us with the steadying voice of a woman who has seen and overcome more obstacles than most of us will ever be required to contemplate, “is that it steals our imagination.” We must begin by stealing it back.
Can technology assist us in this task?
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By now, almost everyone on the left is on board with the notion that a pillar of the new world order is the dismantling of the prison industrial complex and the carceral state. Yet Cullors has a deeper, more poignant point to make: “So much of our society is organized around punishment,” she says. We don’t just punish those deemed to be criminals, we punish one another. We criticize, belittle, and cancel one another. Even those ostensibly fighting for the same things we are. On a recent Instagram post, Cullors explains that part of why she wrote her book is “because I believe progressive movements need a culture that helps the rest of the world be better to and for each other.”
“The gossip culture. The take down culture. The lack of support for each other,” it all represents an “inability to use abolition in our everyday lives.” Our everyday lives – that is in part what we’re here to explore in the color-soaked LA store, an environment swathed in swatches of iridescent and patterned fabrics visually exhorting us to defy the grey rules of authority. How can we support one another as we journey toward a new world in concrete actionable ways? As Cullors continues on her IG post: “Abolition isn’t just about changing outside systems, it’s about our interpersonal relationships and how we can move away from an economy of violence and towards an economy of care.” [4]
Our interpersonal relations exist however in a cultural field in which we are inundated by narratives of techno-domination. Cullors notes that almost all film/TV stories about technology present it as something that traps us or dooms us which we must fight to overthrow – the Terminator paradigm. This constant battle-mentality is part of the problem. Can we imagine a society in which technology isn’t ipso facto something to be scared of but a force to help us create the kind of future we want? If it is indubitably the case that “big tech has always had a relationship with the military and the police” then what are “the organizing principles that challenge this?” In other words, “how can we push back?”
At the end of her introduction to “abolitionism” as a wider movement and globally relevant mind-set, Cullors posed this question to Dr. Epps, who stands herself – as a Black woman, an activist and a researcher trained in data analysis – at an extraordinary confluence of factors personal, political and technological. On Epps’s website she describes her research as an exploration of “how online, machine learning-driven ecologies influence youth of color as they construct and affirm racialized and gendered identities.” It is in answer to Cullors’ query that Epps articulates a hope for tech to embody values other than “optimization and efficiency,” those twin demons underlying tech-world mania for doing things “at scale,” thereby reducing humans, and everything else, to units to be squeezed for pennies at every turn.
“What are the values we want it to support?” she in turn asks.
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For Epps, AI is a “scaffolding” – not an end in itself (already a revolutionary thought) but rather a tool to get us somewhere different. In Hollywood films “a fantasy” persists “that we can’t have agency, that we’re disposable and have no power against the machines.” What we need instead, she says, is “a visionary approach to these technologies.”
Of course any such thinking “needs to be mindful” of the powers we’re up against, “the robot-killer machine-gun dogs” being unleashed on our streets, and so on. Revolutionaries can’t be naive about “autonomous weapons” Epps hastens to add. still She is “hopeful” and it’s this hopefulness that I took away from the event.
Although the term ‘Afrofuturism’ wasn’t uttered this evening, hope is also threaded through much of that great outpouring of speculative imagining, from the sonic fabulations and mythocosmic philosophies of musicians such as Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic, to Black sci-fi giants Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany and the Marvel Comics superhero Black Panther. Curator Ingrid LaFleur has defined the term as “a way of imagining possible futures through a black lens,” while Ytasha Womak, in Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, speaks of “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.”
I’ve been wanting to write for a while about AI, but what can be said that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops. We are drowning in AI hype both good and bad – from the self-serving positive-isms of Sam Altman (EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE!!!!), to the doom-laden prognostications of Gary Marcus, who (even if I often agree with him) seems to be filling an ecological niche predicated on the IMPORTANCE of his prey. Amid this cacophony, social justice thinking that foregrounds community rather than computing power is sorely needed; which is why I’d braved LA rush-hour traffic to hear what Cullors and Epps had to say.
As a white woman I can’t speak to Afrofutrism except to applaud its vitalness, but as I listened to Cullors and Epps I found myself thinking about another liberatory movement with an uneasy relationship to technology: feminism.
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As a lifelong feminist and lover of science (I have degrees in physics and computer science), I’ve long been troubled by an almost reflexive negativity towards science and technology in a lot of feminist discourse. Of course there are reasons for this. Both women and people of color have been cast by centuries of science-thinking as lesser beings, even sub-humans. Feminists are right to be skeptical of what the science historian Mary Midgely has termed the “science as salvation” model.
At least since Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, proponents of science have been declaring that science will save us. Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) still reads like a manifesto that almost could have been written now, and Sam Altman with his paternalistic arrogance demanding quasi-infinite resources hasn’t updated the script one iota. The degree to which today’s AI Bros mirror the high-priest “Fathers” of the New Atlantis is uncanny: both claim semi-divine status, both preside over gigantic machines, both claim to know what’s best for the rest of us, and both expect us to not only applaud their salvific gifts but to bow down in supplication to their supranatural genius for innovation – the stock of the new.
That said, there is urgent need for feminists to engage with science, because if we don’t the Big Boys win without a fight. Like Black people, women people need to get a voice at STEM tables so we can be involved in determining what future/s we want. AI isn’t going away so those of us who wish to bring about different worlds can’t allow ourselves to be steam-rolled yet again by a bunch of quasi-religious, elite-Boy-O wet-dreams. [2] [3] It is no coincidence that the author of the New Atlantis was also the man who gave us the image of the scientist as a man tormenting nature to bend ‘her’ to his will. Nature has a tendancy to run amok, Bacon thought, unless “she is put in constraint, molded and made as it were new by art and the hand of man; as in things artificial ... nature takes orders from man and works under his authority."
As it happens there is a strand of positive-technoscience-feminism whose authors have dared to imagine futures in which science and technology are deployed in the service of creating and sustaining people-positive communities. Among the most well known is Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, about a collectivist utopian planet and a physicist who discovers a theory that enables faster-than-light communication between worlds. One of my favorites is Marge Piercy’s bonkers, confronting, time-travel epic Woman on the Edge of Time, where, on a post-apocalyptic Earth, pollution, patriarchy, homelessness, homophobia, racism, consumerism and classism have been transcended. Piercy presents a future in which babies are gestated in artificial wombs so men and women truly become equals, and all children are assigned three ‘parents’ (of any sex) at birth, all of whom can take hormones to lactate and breast-feed. In this classless, racial-difference-affirming society the only pronoun is “per” – short for “person.” This from a book published in 1976.
For orthogonal thinking about alternative futures we can also point to the work of feminist scholars Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret and Karen Barad, among others, who have all seen in technoscience resources for critiquing current social structures and imagining more cooperative/equal/collectivist ones.
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Personally, I don’t know if we can control the AI genie, or if the “robot-killer machine-gun dogs” will win out. Surveying the landscape today, where every week brings new revelations about AI companies getting into bed with the military industrial complex (we see you Palmer Luckey; we see you Google), it’s easy to succumb to despair. But that path so easily becomes self-fulfilling and, as Cullors stresses, it will sap us of our agency. In the Black Lives Matter movement; in feminism; in the Catholic theology I was raised on; and for Barack Obama too, hope is a territory we should never concede.
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[1] Shoutout to Lauren Bon at the Metabolic Studio (and their substack) for introducing me to Cullors and Epps and alerting me to this event.
[2] For a critique of the religiosity underlying AI-hype today I recommend this post by David Morris at his Dark Markets substack, as well as the academic article on which it reflects, by AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres, which links the ethos+hype of AGI (artificial general intelligence) to early 20th century eugenics .
[3] In my book Pythagoras Trousers (1995) I wrote about the religious underpinnings of modern physics – the long history of the idea that physics is a search for “the mind of God.” But today it’s AI scientists who are positioning themselves as the high priests of science – a subject I’ll explore in another post.
[4] Regarding the liberatory philosophy Cullors champions: The question of how “we might move from an economy of violence to an economy of care” was precisely the issue animating my mother and her second-wave feminist friends in 1970’s Australia. My mom went from being a Catholic mother of six children (six babies birthed in five and a half years!) to helping to get federal funding for the first women’s refuges in Australia. She was also instrumental in having rape-in-marriage made illegal in the the state of New South Wales. Australia was one of the first countries to achieve this. In some southern US states it’s still legal for a man to rape his wife, and so much of what 70’s feminists like my mom fought for is now being taken away.
I've been thinking since I read this post that I write too much with the implicit assumption that people's choices are either to accept AI tech or to fight it. That Manichean framing doesn't fit the lives of real people, who are more likely to take the tech and make it their own, as much as they can. Ie, not a supine "yes" to AI nor a self-denying "no," but rather, "yes, but on my terms." Creating/preserving a space for that is maybe the right kind of resistance to brotopian schemes.
God knows there are a lot of people designing robotics systems who very much *don't* want to create a top-down, hyper-surveilled, efficiency maximizing hellscape --- people who are thinking seriously about how to make AI and robots that promote human flourishing. How well their hopes cross over from universities into the world of gov't and business, I don't know.
But I certainly agree we in "media" have to do more than presenting AI as something to either accept or fight. A trap to be avoided. So I was glad to learn about this work.