Ninth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The question of artificial intelligence has been widely debated in the Humanities, with scholars such as Margaret Boden and Eliezer Yudkowsky arguing that AI represents a major threat to human sense of knowledge, agency, and truth. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed the issue of the Big Data economy that dictates the standards of AI patterns applied to society. My paper analyzes the issue of values with a special focus on attention, surveillance, and consumerist feedback loops that are shaping the informational trajectories of innovation within the top AI sectors (communication, transportation, personal devices, business, and medical sciences). Specifically, I look at categories of economic values within the dominant order of global capitalism, to show that knowledge (ancestral know-how embedded in the tools we use) can become the guiding force building a collective intelligence of the future. I discuss machine learning and computational reasoning and place them in dialogue with policy making and alternative economic systems of valuation to reveal the previously misunderstood connections between automated machine and economic prosperity. I argue that the economy of contribution can be applied to overcome the hegemonic and extractive models of current AI networks of command and control. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining the notion of collective intelligence, offers a new way of understanding the rarely acknowledged potential of AI as a revolutionary tool for political participation and civilian contribution.