Radical AI Network

Radical AI work

There are many kinds of radical AI work. Here, we name 11 radical AI tactics and present works that develop or exemplify the tactics.

Make visible how technoscience and data science shift power, historically and currently
- Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner
- An Agenda for Decolonizing Data Science by Noopur Raval
- Technologies of Power: From Area Studies to Data Sciences by Manan Asif
Make visible how AI shifts power currently and call for something else
- 2020 Vision: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society by Ruha Benjamin
- Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence by Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, William Isaac
- Algorithmic Injustices: Towards a Relational Ethicsby Abeba Birhane and Fred Cummins
- Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
- The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism by Matteo Pasquinelli and Vladan Joler
- Excavating AI by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen
- Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, & Power in AI by Sarah Myers West, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford
- Counting the Countless by Os Keyes
- Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline by <a href=”https://twitter.com/forcriticaltech”Coalition for Critical Technology</a>
- Studying Up: Reorienting the field of algorithmic fairness around issues of power by Chelsea Barabas, Colin Doyle, JB Rubinovitz and Karthik Dinakar
Adopt a critical technical practice: a technical practice that continuously reflects on, investigates, and exposes critiques of current AI
- Beyond Algorithmic Reformism: Forward Engineering the Designs of Algorithmic Systems by Peter Polack
- Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI by Philip Agre
- Gender Shades by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru
- Racial Categories in Machine Learning by Sebastian Benthall and Bruce D. Haynes
- Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products by Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Joy Buolamwini
Refuse and advocate against oppressive AI practices
- Feminist Data ManifestNO by the Feminist Data Studies Workshop
- Abolish Big Data by Yeshi
Advocate for impacted people to be the direct decision-makers
- Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI by Os Keyes, Jossephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard
- AI after the pandemic by Daniel McQuillan
Organize; datafied peoples, data laborers, tech labors, tech workers, and researchers can all organize themselves to collectively resist and challenge oppressive AI.
- Tech Workers Coalition
- With Great Tech Comes Great Responsibility by the Mozilla Foundation
- Digital Defense Playbook by Our Data Bodies
- New York tenants fight as landlords embrace facial recognition cameras
- Organizing at Tech Companies: The Google Walkout by Claire Stapleton, Tanuja Gupta, Meredith Whittaker, Celie O’Neil-Hart, Stephanie Parker, Erica Anderson, and Amr Gaber
- Turkopticon
Dream up liberatory relationships with AI
- Making Kin with the Machines by Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite
- Dreaming up Radical AI zine adapted from A People’s Guide to AI by Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg
- Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper by The Indigenous Protocol and AI Working Group
- What does the future of AI look like? by Kekuhi Keali‘ikanaka‘oleohaililani
Dream up and co-create technologies that equip people to resist, to escape, to investigate, to contest, to organize against, to influence, to dismantle, and to create AI anew; do so critically, responsibly, and with hope.
- The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by Philip Rogaway
- How Machine Learning Research Shifts Power by Ria Kalluri
- The White Collar Crime Map
- The Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab
Document the situatedness and subjectivity of AI work
- Data Feminism, Chapter 1, by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
- “Good” isn’t good enough by Ben Green
- #unsettle: Border Thinking by Data & Society
- Where fairness fails: data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse by Anna Lauren Hoffmann
- Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination by Sasha Costanza-Chock
Open up power structures to subversion; instead of assimilating into powerful institutions, open them to create new possibilities
- ‘Retooling Solidarity, Reimagining Justice’, Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin

More radical AI work

Here we highlight more projects that inspire us; some were done by members of the Radical AI Network and many were done by others.

Books

Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
Captivating Technology by Ruha Benjamin
Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
Indigenous Statistics by Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen
Distributed Blackness, André Brock Jr.
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Meredith Broussard
Indigenous Statistics by Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen

Communities

Past events

Counter-Technologies at the Edgelands
The Color of Surveillance
Data feminism reading group
Our Relationship with AI: Exploring the Present & Dreaming Up Radical Futures workshop @ FAccT CtrlZ.AI Zine Fair 2020
Radical ML: towards AI as a tool of liberation workshop @ SOCMLx Montreal 2019
Radical AI Community Dinners, annually at NeurIPS and ICML
CtrlZ.AI Zine Fair 2020

Get Involved

If you are doing Radical AI work, you are part of the Radical AI project! If you would like to join the Radical AI Network — a community of self-identified Radical AI folks connecting, learning, and deepening our radical AI work — we organize ourselves in a Slack workspace. To join, email a little about yourself to the.radical.ai.network@gmail.com.