Abstract
One flicker point of today’s geopolitics is around the race of artificial intelligence (AI), mainly between the two monolithic stakeholders, the United States and China. What if the logic, the twist, and the turn of such struggle, underlying the surface gloss of a national competition for technocratic primacy, is more fundamentally a competition between alternative articulations of cultural politics, expressed in the language of AI? The essay follows the “cultural turn” of Machine Learning and argues for an “end-to-end” sociological analysis of AI, not as a technical implement but as a techno-social semiosis working into a locality with implications of mutual transformation vis-à-vis grounded epistemologies. The essay delves into such a transformation process in the case of postsocialist China by mobilizing both AI and China as analytical as opposed to essential categories, with their own telos, cosmos, and historicity, and contends to prioritize “social” as the level of analysis where a cultural politics of AI is taking shape through AI’s “deep learning” of the postsocialist Chinese reality. The core pitch is a serious consideration of postsocialist informationalism as an alternative articulation of Cloud politics with nuanced but important differences in sociopolitical implications than the neoliberal one.
Presenters
Qiaoyu CaiStudent, Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Cultural Politics of AI, Interactive Logic, Postsocialist Informationalism, Class Politics
