Accelerationism

15 minute piece made for White Review's programme on Resonance FM, illustrating and extending ideas from Ghosts Of My Life

The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

A lecture by Mark Fisher on Nick Land, Jean Francois Lyotard and Anti-vitalism.

Mark Fisher - Anti - Vital

Americans pride ourselves on being an innovative nation, but lately it feels like that innovation is more directed at fast food menu item permutations and  iPhone apps that turn everyone into low wage workers, and less aimed at tackling problems of climate change and societal inequality.  In Waffletaco-less Scandinavia, more money is spent on public education and more researchers are publishing more papers and securing more scientific patents than ever.

Irregular Correspondent Mikael Mikaelsson has been thinking a lot about the Nordic values and policies behind their innovation boom, and he calls in to talk with Chuck about his new job studying innovation across borders, why public investment in scientific research enjoys results (and public support) across Scandinavia, and why a change in American education and news media would yield better results than a change in elected politicians.

Mikael Mikaelsson is currently working for the UK Government, covering bilateral policy engagement in science and innovation between the UK and the Nordic countries. He lives in Stockholm.

Live from Stockholm, Mikael Mikaelsson considers the Nordic innovation system.

On this week’s show James Butler and Aaron Bastani discuss the relationship between utopia, politics and technology asking ‘what is the utopia of capital‘?

Utopia And Ideology - Bacon's 'New Atlantis' To Bitcoin

On Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies (2014) with the author, a philosophy professor at Oxford.

Just grant the hypothetical that machine intelligence advances will eventually produce a machine capable of further improving itself, and becoming much smarter than we are. Put aside the question of whether such a being could in principle be conscious or self-conscious or have a soul or whatever. None of those are necessary for it to be capable, say, of developing and manufacturing a trillion nanobots which it could then use to remake the earth.

Bostrom thinks that we can make some predictions about the motivations of such a being, whatever goals it’s programmed to achieve, e.g. its goals will entail that it won’t want those goals changed by us. This sets up challenges for us in advance to figure out ways to frame and implement motivational programming an A.I. before it’s smart enough to resist future changes. Can we in effect tell the A.I. to figure out and do whatever we would ask it to do if we were better informed and wiser? Can we offload philosophical thought to such a superior intelligence in this way? Bostrom thinks that philosophers are in a great position for well-informed speculation on topics like this.

Mark, Dylan, and Nick are also joined by former philosophy podcaster Luke Muehlhauser.

Go to blog

Dangers of A.I. with Nick Bostrom

Speaker(s): Professor Judy Wajcman, Genevieve Bell | Judy Wajcman explores why it is that we both blame technology for speeding up everyday life and yet turn to digital devices for the solution. The event marks the publication of Professor Judy Wajcman's new book Pressed for Time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at LSE. Genevieve Bell (@feraldata) is Vice President of User Experience Research at Intel Labs. Anthony Giddens is a former director of LSE and a Member of the House of Lords. The Department of Sociology at LSE (@LSEsociology) was established in 1904 and remains committed to top quality teaching and leading research and scholarship today.

Pressed for Time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism [Audio]

Speaker(s): Dr Benjamin Noys | How can we imagine a way out of the stasis of a Europe mired in financial crisis? The proponents of ‘accelerationism’ argue the need to embrace forces of abstraction and technology that can escape ‘old’ Europe. In this talk, Benjamin Noys will critically explore these alternative geographical imaginaries as attempts to come to terms with the ‘uneven’ forms of capital within Europe. Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester.

Accelerate Europe: the geographical imaginaries of accelerationism [Audio]

Journalist Robert Scheer breaks down the DC/Silicon Valley merger running America's wired tyranny, and explains why we should worry that we've never been so vulnerable to a government that has never been so secretive.

Bob's newest book is "They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy."

Robert Scheer is a journalist and editor-in-chief of Truthdig. 

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/hardcover/they-know-everything-about-you/9781568584522

Fear, secrecy and data fuel America's modern surveillance state.

Sociologist Nicole Aschoff examines how the smartphone functions as both digital identity portal and corporate commodifier.

Nicole's newest writing is the article "The Smartphone Society" in the newest issue of Jacobin.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/smartphone-usage-technology-aschoff/

Nicole Aschoff is a sociologist, writer and editor at Jacobin.


Selfie-Alienation: How the smartphone unlocks a new frontier of commodification.

Writer Curtis White looks at the tomorrow being sold by today's tech cheerleaders and sees massive environmental and economic disruption guided by the rise of a myopic, Randian technoplutocracy, and explains how it's not too late to change the course we're on, and why the key to resisting tech narratives might be found in the romanticism of Bjork.

Curtis is author of "We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data" from Melville House.

http://shop.mhpbooks.com/products/we-robots

Technobabel: Against the inevitability of tomorrow's robot economy.

Speaker(s): Dr Kate Devlin, Dr Mateja Jamnik, Professor Huw Price, Dr Mark Sprevak 
Chair: Dr Jonathan Birch

Recorded on 7 December 2015 at Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

AI is progressing fast. What level has it reached? Is human-level AI a realistic possibility? And if it is achieved in the near future, what will the consequences be for humanity? Could AI threaten our very existence? In this panel discussion, philosophers Huw Price and Mark Sprevak and computer scientists Mateja Jamnik and Kate Devlin discuss these and other questions concerning AI and the future of humanity. 

Kate Devlin is a Lecturer in Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Mateja Jamnik is Senior Lecturer in Computing at Cambridge. 

Huw Price is Professor of Philosophy, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge. 

Mark Sprevak is Senior Lecture of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. 

Dr Jonathan Birch is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow. 

The Forum for European Philosophy (@ForumPhilosophy) is an educational charity that organises a full and varied programme of philosophy and interdisciplinary events in the UK.

Will Machines Rule the World?

Democrats on welfare / Bernie's race problem / Water vs democracy in Italy / Reclaiming postcapitalism / Haiti's nonelection / Old man socialism

For more interview Hell, visit www.thisishell.com

Episode 886: Accelerationalism (Full Broadcast - February 6th, 2016)

Speaker(s): Professor Hartmut Rosa | In this lecture Professor Rosa argues that popular and scholarly claims about acceleration gloss over the complex relationship of technology, speed and time. Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology at the University of Jena and Director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology. She is author of Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Nigel Dodd (@nigelbdodd) is Professor in the Sociology Department at the LSE. The Department of Sociology at LSE (@LSEsociology) was established in 1904 and remains committed to top quality teaching and leading research and scholarship today.

Do We Really Live in an Acceleration Society? [Audio]

We talk with writer Angela Nagle about her work studying the alt-right, its different stripes, divisions, and contradictions. Far before Milo fell from grace, Angela predicted that the alt-right would splinter and cannibalize sooner rather than later.

Here's Angela's article: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/paleocons-for-porn/

Episode 86 - Fash The Patriarchy feat. Angela Nagle (2/26/17)

Political scientist Mara Rockeymoore surveys the impact of autonomous vehicles on the driving profession, and automation on American labor as a whole - and calls for policies that protect workers threatened by precarity, and ensure the benefits of automation are spread across society, and not just redirected into the hands of the wealthy.

Maya is co-author of the report "Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work" from the Center for Global Policy Solutions.

What do driverless vehicles mean for workless drivers?

Speaker(s): Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs | The automation of robots and artificial intelligence is pretty well advanced in certain industries. The income now is shifting more and more to capital and away from workers, contributing to a general widening of inequality in the United States. Jeff Sachs argues that we need to pursue policies so that the coming generation of smart machines works for us and our well-being, rather than humanity working for the machines and the few who control their operating systems. Jeffrey D. Sachs (@JeffDSachs) is Professor of Economics at Columbia University, a leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Francesco Caselli is Norman Sosnow Professor of Economics, LSE, and Director of the Macroeconomics Program at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). The CEP (@CEP_LSE) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the LSE Research Laboratory. It was established by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in 1990 and is now one of the leading economic research groups in Europe.  The International Growth Centre (@The_IGC) aims to promote sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research. The IGC directs a global network of world-leading researchers and in-country teams in Africa and South Asia and works closely with partner governments to generate high quality research and policy advice on key growth challenges.

Man and Machine: the macroeconomics of the digital revolution [Audio]

More at https://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/internet-things.

Smart TVs, refrigerators, cars, and houses—the internet of things refers to the networking of all the devices in our lives, as they gather data and interact with one another, apparently to make our lives easier. How will this augmented connectivity affect the way we live? If government agencies or hackers can potentially access the data our devices gather, what will become of privacy? Josh and Ken get smart with renowned computer scientist Carl Hewitt, editor of "Inconsistency Robustness (Studies in Logic)."

The Internet of Things

Game developer Zoë Quinn discusses her experiences at the center of the viral harassment campaign Gamergate, and explains why our offline values - around data commodification, extremism and media exposure - need to catch up to the realities of a culture lived, and increasingly contested, in online spaces 

Zoë is author of "Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate" from PublicAffairs. Zoe is on a book tour right now.

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/crash-override/zoe-quinn/9781610398091

https://zoequinn.squarespace.com/crash-override-book-tour

Online at the witch trials: Zoe Quinn on Gamergate and overriding harassment.

Writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher explains how racial and sexual bias finds its way from society into digital products (and back into society) as a result of the tech industry's unwillingness to examine its own values, and they way their work engages with and shapes society beyond the mostly white, male corporate campuses of Silicon Valley.

Sara is author of "Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech" from W.W. Norton: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-63463-1/

Social inequality is coded deep within the devices of Silicon Valley.

Investigative journalist Yasha Levine explains why the internet has been a surveillance tool since day one - as a Cold War project to monitor populations pushing back against the militarization of society, and as the synthesis of corporate and state power in service of protecting the interests of the ruling class - yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Yasha is author of the new book "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" from PublicAffairs: https://surveillancevalley.com/

Accelerationism

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