danmcquillan.org

Abstract for seminar at the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT)

This is the draft abstract for my research seminar at the Goldsmiths Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT), as part of the 2024-2025 series 'On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral University'.

The hybrid seminar will be on Wednesday 11th June 2025 4:00-6:00pm UK time in RHB room 138 and on Zoom. Online registration is available via the seminar session page.

Drawing on Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality', this talk will argue that an important role for the contemporary university is to resist AI. The university as a space for the pursuit of knowledge and the development of independent thought has long been undermined by neoliberal restructuring and the ambitions of the Ed Tech industry. So-called generative AI has added computational shock and awe to the assault on criticality, both inside and outside higher education, despite the gulf between the rhetoric and the actual capacities of its computational operations. Such is the synergy between AI's dissimulations and emerging political currents that AI will become embedded in all aspects of students' lives at university and afterwards, preempting and foreclosing diverse futures. It's vital to develop alternatives to AI's optimised nihilism and to sustain the joyful knowledge that nothing is inevitable and other worlds are still possible. The talk will ask what Illich has to teach us about an approach to technology that prioritises creativity and autonomy, how we can bolster academic inquiry through technical inquiry, workers' inquiry and struggle inquiry, and whether the future of higher education should enrol lecturers and students in a process of collective decomputing.

danmcquillan.org

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