systemic disparity

All posts tagged systemic disparity

Reimagining “AI’s” Environmental and Sociotechnical Materialities

There’s a new open-access book of collected essays called Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity, and I happen to have an essay in it. The collection is made of contributions from participants in the October 2024 “Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity” panels and workshops put on by Jess Reia, MC Forelle, and Yingchong Wang, and I’ve included my essay here, for you. That said, I highly recommend checking out the rest of the book, because all the contributions are fantastic.

This work was co-sponsored by: The Karsh Institute Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, The Environmental Institute, and The School of Data Science, all at UVA. The videos for both days of the “Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity” talks are now available, and you can find them at the Karsh Institute website, and also below, before the text of my essay.

All in all, I think these these are some really great conversations on “AI” and environmental justice. They cover “AI”‘s extremely material practical aspects, the deeply philosophical aspects, and the necessary and fundamental connections between the two, and these are crucial discussions to be having, especially right now.

Hope you dig it.

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It’s really disheartening and honestly kind of telling that in spite of everything, ChatGPT is actively marketing itself to students in the run-up to college finals season.

We’ve talked many (many) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to systems built by people who have repeatedly, doggedly proven that they will a) buy into their own hype and b) refuse to ever question their own biases and hubris. But additionally, there’s been at least two papers in the past few months alone, and more in the last two years (1, 2, 3), demonstrating that over-reliance on “AI” tools diminishes critical thinking capacity and prevents students from building the kinds of foundational skills which allow them to learn more complex concepts, adapt to novel situations, and grow into experts.

Screenshot of ChatpGPT page:ChaptGPT Promo: 2 months free for students ChatGPT Plus is now free for college students through May Offer valid for students in the US and Canada [Buttons reading "Claim offer" and "learn more" An image of a pencil scrawling a scribbly and looping line] ChatGPT Plus is here to help you through finals

Screenshot of ChatGPT[.]com/students showing an introductory offer for college students during finals; captured 04/04/2025

That lack of expertise and capacity has a direct impact on people’s ability to discern facts, produce knowledge, and even participate in civic/public life. The diminishment of critical thinking skills makes people more susceptible to propaganda and other forms of dis- and misinformation— problems which, themselves, are already being exacerbated by the proliferation of “Generative AI” text and image systems and people not fulling understanding them for the bullshit engines they are.

The abovementioned susceptibility allows authoritarian-minded individuals and groups to thus further degrade belief in shared knowledge and consensus reality and to erode trust in expertise, thus exacerbating and worsening the next turn on the cycle when it starts all over again.

All of this creates the very conditions by which authoritarians seek to cement their control: by undercutting the individual tools and social mechanisms which can empower the populace to understand and challenge the kinds of damage dictators, theocrats, fascists, and kleptocrats seek to do on the path to enriching themselves and consolidating power.

And here’s OpenAI flagrantly encouraging said over-reliance. The original post on linkedIn even has an image of someone prompting ChatGPT to guide them on “mastering [a] calc 101 syllabus in two weeks.” So that’s nice.

No wait; the other thing… Terrible. It’s terrible.

View Kate Rouch’s graphic linkKate RouchKate Rouch • 3rd+Premium • 3rd+ Chief Marketing Officer at OpenAI.Chief Marketing Officer at OpenAI. 21h • Edited • 21 hours ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn ChatGPT Plus is free during finals! We can’t achieve our mission without empowering young people to use AI. Fittingly, today we launched our first scaled marketing campaign. The campaign shows students different ways to take advantage of ChatGPT as they study, work out, try to land jobs, and plan their summers. It also offers ChatGPT Plus’s more advanced capabilities to students for free through their finals. You’ll see creative on billboards, digital ads, podcasts, and more throughout the coming weeks. We hope you learn something useful! If you’re a college student in the US or Canada, you can claim the offer at www.chatgpt.com/students

Screenshot of a linkedIn post from OpenAI’s chief marketing officer. Captured 04/04/2025

Understand this. Push back against it. Reject its wholesale uncritical adoption and proliferation. Demand a more critical and nuanced stance on “AI” from yourself, from your representatives at every level, and from every company seeking to shove this technology down our throats.

Audio, Slides, and Transcript for my 2024 SEAC Keynote

Back in October, I was the keynote speaker for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum‘s 25th annual conference. My talk was titled “On Truth, Values, Knowledge, and Democracy in the Age of Generative ‘AI,’” and it touched on a lot of things that I’ve been talking and writing about for a while (in fact, maybe the title is familiar?), but especially in the past couple of years. Covered deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, the social construction of knowledge, artifacts, and consensus reality, and more. And I know it’s been a while since the talk, but it’s not like these things have gotten any less pertinent, these past months.

As a heads-up, I didn’t record the Q&A because I didn’t get the audience’s permission ahead of time, and considering how much of this is about consent, that’d be a little weird, yeah? Anyway, it was in the Q&A section where we got deep into the environmental concerns of water and power use, including ways to use those facts to get through to students who possibly don’t care about some of the other elements. There were a honestly a lot of really trenchant questions from this group, and I was extremely glad to meet and think with them. Really hoping to do so more in the future, too.

A Black man with natural hair shaved on the sides & long in the center, grey square-frame glasses, wearing a silver grey suit jacket, a grey dress shirt with a red and black Paisley tie, and a black N95 medical mask stands on a stage behind a lectern and in front of a large screen showing a slide containing the words On Truth, Values, Knowledge,and Democracy in the Age of Generative “AI”Dr. Damien Patrick Williams Assistant Professor of Philosophy Assistant Professor of Data Science University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and an image of the same man, unmasked, with a beard, wearing a silver-grey pinstriped waistcoat & a dark grey shirt w/ a purple paisley tie in which bookshelves filled w/ books & framed degrees are visible in the background

Me at the SEAC conference; photo taken by Jason Robert (see alt text for further detailed description).

Below, you’ll find the audio, the slides, and the lightly edited transcript (so please forgive any typos and grammatical weirdnesses). All things being equal, a goodly portion of the concepts in this should also be getting worked into a longer paper coming out in 2025.

Hope you dig it.

Until Next Time.

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Much of my research deals with the ways in which bodies are disciplined and how they go about resisting that discipline. In this piece, adapted from one of the answers to my PhD preliminary exams written and defended two months ago, I “name the disciplinary strategies that are used to control bodies and discuss the ways that bodies resist those strategies.” Additionally, I address how strategies of embodied control and resistance have changed over time, and how identifying and existing as a cyborg and/or an artificial intelligence can be understood as a strategy of control, resistance, or both.

In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, he spends some time discussing the different understandings of the word “discipline” and the role their transformations have played in the definition and transmission of knowledge as both artifacts and culture. In particular, he uses the space in section three of chapter two to discuss the role Foucault has played in historical understandings of knowledge, categorization, and disciplinarity. Using Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, we can draw an explicit connection between the various meanings “discipline” and ways that bodies are individually, culturally, and socially conditioned to fit particular modes of behavior, and the specific ways marginalized peoples are disciplined, relating to their various embodiments.

This will demonstrate how modes of observation and surveillance lead to certain types of embodiments being deemed “illegal” or otherwise unacceptable and thus further believed to be in need of methodologies of entrainment, correction, or reform in the form of psychological and physical torture, carceral punishment, and other means of institutionalization.

Locust, “Master and Servant (Depeche Mode Cover)”

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Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture” given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, in early September.

(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture,” talk given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, September 2019)

[Direct Link to the Mp3]

[Damien Patrick Williams]

Thank you, everybody, for being here. I’m going to stand a bit far back from this mic and project, I’m also probably going to pace a little bit. So if you can’t hear me, just let me know. This mic has ridiculously good pickup, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.

So the conversation that we’re going to be having today is titled as “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture.”

I’m using the term “SFF” to stand for “science fiction and fantasy,” but we’re going to be looking at pop culture more broadly, because ultimately, though science fiction and fantasy have some of the most obvious entrees into discussions of STS and how making doing culture, society can influence technology and the history of fictional worlds can help students understand the worlds that they’re currently living in, pop Culture more generally, is going to tie into the things that students are going to care about in a way that I think is going to be kind of pertinent to what we’re going to be talking about today.

So why we are doing this:

Why are we teaching it with science fiction and fantasy? Why does this matter? I’ve been teaching off and on for 13 years, I’ve been teaching philosophy, I’ve been teaching religious studies, I’ve been teaching Science, Technology and Society. And I’ve been coming to understand as I’ve gone through my teaching process that not only do I like pop culture, my students do? Because they’re people and they’re embedded in culture. So that’s kind of shocking, I guess.

But what I’ve found is that one of the things that makes students care the absolute most about the things that you’re teaching them, especially when something can be as dry as logic, or can be as perhaps nebulous or unclear at first, I say engineering cultures, is that if you give them something to latch on to something that they are already from with, they will be more interested in it. If you can show to them at the outset, “hey, you’ve already been doing this, you’ve already been thinking about this, you’ve already encountered this, they will feel less reticent to engage with it.”

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Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk ‘”Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems,’ given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, back in May 2019.

(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. ‘”Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems;’ talk given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; May 2019)

Now, I’ve got a chapter coming out about this, soon, which I can provide as a preprint draft if you ask, and can be cited as “Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design,” appearing in Philosophy And Engineering: Reimagining Technology And Social Progress. Guru Madhavan, Zachary Pirtle, and David Tomblin, eds. Forthcoming from Springer, 2019. But I wanted to get the words I said in this talk up onto some platforms where people can read them, as soon as possible, for a  couple of reasons.

First, the Current Occupants of the Oval Office have very recently taken the policy position that algorithms can’t be racist, something which they’ve done in direct response to things like Google’s Hate Speech-Detecting AI being biased against black people, and Amazon claiming that its facial recognition can identify fear, without ever accounting for, i dunno, cultural and individual differences in fear expression?

[Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.]


All these things taken together are what made me finally go ahead and get the transcript of that talk done, and posted, because these are events and policy decisions about which I a) have been speaking and writing for years, and b) have specific inputs and recommendations about, and which are, c) frankly wrongheaded, and outright hateful.

And I want to spend time on it because I think what doesn’t get through in many of our discussions is that it’s not just about how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Algorithmic instances get trained, but the processes for how and the cultural environments in which HUMANS are increasingly taught/shown/environmentally encouraged/socialized to think is the “right way” to build and train said systems.

That includes classes and instruction, it includes the institutional culture of the companies, it includes the policy landscape in which decisions about funding and get made, because that drives how people have to talk and write and think about the work they’re doing, and that constrains what they will even attempt to do or even understand.

All of this is cumulative, accreting into institutional epistemologies of algorithm creation. It is a structural and institutional problem.

So here are the Slides:

The Audio:

[Direct Link to Mp3]

And the Transcript is here below the cut:

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Kirsten and I spent the week between the 17th and the 21st of September with 18 other utterly amazing people having Chatham House Rule-governed conversations about the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

We were in Norway, in the Juvet Landscape Hotel, which is where they filmed a lot of the movie Ex Machina, and it is even more gorgeous in person. None of the rooms shown in the film share a single building space. It’s astounding as a place of both striking architectural sensibility and also natural integration as they built every structure in the winter to allow the dormancy cycles of the plants and animals to dictate when and where they could build, rather than cutting anything down.

And on our first full day here, Two Ravens flew directly over my and Kirsten’s heads.

Yes.

[Image of a rainbow rising over a bend in a river across a patchy overcast sky, with the river going between two outcropping boulders, trees in the foreground and on either bank and stretching off into the distance, and absolutely enormous mountains in the background]

I am extraordinarily grateful to Andy Budd and the other members of the Clear Left team for organizing this, and to Cennydd Bowles for opening the space for me to be able to attend, and being so forcefully enthused about the prospect of my attending that he came to me with a full set of strategies in hand to get me to this place. That kind of having someone in your corner means the world for a whole host of personal reasons, but also more general psychological and socially important ones, as well.

I am a fortunate person. I am a person who has friends and resources and a bloody-minded stubbornness that means that when I determine to do something, it will more likely than not get fucking done, for good or ill.

I am a person who has been given opportunities to be in places many people will never get to see, and have conversations with people who are often considered legends in their fields, and start projects that could very well alter the shape of the world on a massive scale.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a grandiose statement, but you’re here reading this, and so you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

I am a person who tries to pay forward what I have been given and to create as many spaces for people to have the opportunities that I have been able to have.

I am not a monetarily wealthy person, measured against my society, but my wealth and fortune are things that strike me still and make me take stock of it all and what it can mean and do, all over again, at least once a week, if not once a day, as I sit in tension with who I am, how the world perceives me, and what amazing and ridiculous things I have had, been given, and created the space to do, because and in violent spite of it all.

So when I and others come together and say we’re going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected BY the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds, then we are going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected by the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds.

So let’s talk about what that means.

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As a part of my alt-ac career, I do a lot of thinking and writing in a lot of diverse areas. I write about human augmentation, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and the occult, and I work with great people to put together conferences on pop culture and academia, all while trying to make a clear case for how important it is to look at the intersection of all of those things. As a result of my wide array of interests, there are always numerous conferences happening in my fields, every year, to which I should be submitting and which I should anyways attempt to attend. Conferences are places to make friends, develop contacts, and hear and respond to new perspectives within our fields. And I would really love to attend even a fraction of these conferences, but the fact is that I am not able to afford them. The cruel irony of most University System structures is that they offer the least travel funding assistance to those faculty members who need it most.

To my mind, the equation should be pretty simple: Full-Time Pay > Part-Time Pay. The fact that someone with a full time position at an institution makes more money means that while any travel assistance they receive is nice, they are less likely to need it as much as someone who is barely subsisting as an adjunct. For adjuncts who are working on at least two revenue streams, a little extra assistance in the form of the University System arranging their rules to provide adjuncts with the necessary funding for conference and research travel, could make all the difference between that conference being attended or that research being completed, and… not. But if it does get done, then the work done by those adjuncts would more likely be attributed to their funding institutions.

Think: If my paper is good enough to get accepted to a long-running international and peer-reviewed conference, don’t you want me thanking one of your University System’s Institutions for getting me there? Wouldn’t that do more to raise the profile of the University System than my calling myself an “Independent Scholar,” or “Unaffiliated?” Because, for an adjunct with minimal support from the University System, scrabbling to find a way to make registration, plane tickets, and accommodations like childcare, there is really no incentive whatsoever to thank a University System that didn’t do much at all to help with those costs. Why should they even mention them in their submission, at all?

But if an adjunct gets that assistance… Well then they’d feel welcome, wouldn’t they? Then they’d feel appreciated, wouldn’t they? And from that point on, they’re probably much more willing and likely to want everyone they talk to at that conference or research institution to know the name of the institution and system that took care of them. Aren’t They?

My job is great, by the way, and the faculty and administrative staff in my department are wonderful. They have contributed to my professional development in every way they possibly can, and I have seen them do the same for many other adjuncts. Opportunities like temporary full-time positions provide extra income every so often, as well as a view to the workings (and benefits) of full-time faculty life. But at the end of the day we are adjuncts, and there is, in every institution where I’ve studied or worked, a stark dichotomy between what rules and allowances are made for full time employees (many) and those which are made for adjuncts (few). This dichotomy isn’t down to any one department, or any one college, or even in fact any one University. It’s down the University System; it is down to how that system is administered; and it is down to the culture of University Systems Administration, Worldwide.

So if you’re reading this, and you’re a part of that culture, let me just say to you, right now: There are a lot of good people toiling away in poverty, people doing work that is of a high enough quality to get them into conferences or get them published or get them interviewed for comment in national publications. There are good people working for you who can’t (or who are simply disinclined to) raise the profile of your universities, because the funding system has never been arranged to even the playing field for them. They would be far more inclined to sing your praises, if you would just give them a little boost into the choir box.

Simply put, by not valuing and helping your adjuncts, you are actively hurting yourselves.

If you are an administrator or a tenured or tenure-track professor, do know that there is something that you can do: Use your position and power as leverage to fight for greater equality of University System support. Recognize that your adjunct faculty is no longer only focused on teaching, without the responsibilities and requirements of a research-oriented career. Many of them are trying to write, to speak, to teach, and to engage our wider cultural discourse, and they are trying to do it while working for you.


If you like what you read, here, and want to see more like it, then please consider becoming either a recurring Patreon subscriber or making a one-time donation to the Tip Jar, it would be greatly appreciated. A large part of how I support myself in the endeavor to think in public is via those mechanisms.
And thank you.